The odds of a US born child of American parents being a radical Muslim extremist are fairly low; but being the flavor of the month doesn't make them the only consideration. Mr. McVeigh, for instance, was a somewhat explosive character, despite being pretty damn whitebread and a decorated veteran. One Theodore Kaczynski was also a solid, promising sort of chap, not exactly a wild-eyed fundamentalist from sand country...
He showed all apparent seriousness in the belief that the apocalyptic end of history was Coming Real Soon Now
What the fuck?
http://bible.cc/matthew/24-36.htm
“No one knows about that day or hour, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son,f but only the Father.
And, moments before in Matthew 24-34, "Verily I say unto you, This generation shall not pass, till all these things be fulfilled."
Unless you want to put the world "generation" on the rack and really get your exegesis on, he is providing a fairly tight upper bound. He is, as you say, explicitly saying that no more detailed information is available within that bound; but the passing of a generation, best case, is the work of just over a century. That doesn't tell you how to allocate your sick days in order to take advantage of the coming kingdom of god; but it qualifies as "Real Soon Now" by the standards of the end of history....
It's arguably a problem of mismatch between economically feasible granularity(ie. the lower bound on currency unit or quantity of goods you can trade without transaction costs devouring both parties) and the "natural" granularity that people expect from various classes of product.
In some cases, increased granularity actually solves the mismatch, and thus makes everybody happier(Intel only sells CPUs by the 1,000 unit tray. Ordinary people think in a 'natural' granularity three factors of ten smaller. Thankfully, there are middlemen willing to handle this discrepancy for a small fee...)
In other cases, however, increased granularity moves away from an existing match between the feasible and the 'natural' and makes things worse: In this(and a fair number of other) cases, the villain is DRM. Without it, things like books, games, etc. can pretty much only be sold in lumps. There are grey areas(did game X phone in the last episode to sell a sequel/expansion pack? is book Y worthless outside of its trilogy?); but the rough outlines of both 'natural' expectation and economically feasible expectation are basically set. If it isn't big enough to be worth pressing onto CDs and shipping to retail stores, it isn't a product, ergo, all products end up basically being finished products, with the possible exception of some free patches or a sequel/expansion pack also large enough to ship retail. Once you get a reasonably robust DRM framework, though, you can slice and dice material almost arbitrarily finely and at low cost. Unlocks, metering, limited use objects, etc, etc. can all be easily implemented even if everything has to be burned to disk ahead of time. Once downloads come into the mix, you have even more room to move.
Anybody who dares turn Pastafarianism into a real religion will never feel the blessings of His Noodley Appendage, nor shall his place in the afterlife be near the beer volcano!
As for Jesus, though, I'm not so sure. He was, quite arguably, much less of a prick than many who have acted in his name, what with that hippy charity and nonviolence stuff; but the available writings don't exactly paint a picture of a mellow dude who just wanted the ancient near east to chill out and be excellent to each other. He showed all apparent seriousness in the belief that the apocalyptic end of history was Coming Real Soon Now, which is pretty large-caliber religious enthusiasm.
In fact, I sometimes wonder if the transports of atrocious brutality that sometimes overtake his latter-day followers are not a product of frustration stemming from not sharing his confidence: The idea that the end of the world is at hand, with all about to be made right, is a powerful aid to both calm and benevolence. The horrible, sinking, feeling that you are going to face the long, slow, grind of unending history, one broken day at a time, on the other hand, leads either to resignation or to occasional orgies of ultraviolent reform...
Do you think that religion's utility as a smokescreen is unrelated to the degree of reverence that common opinion affords it? (or, for that matter, that every would-be theocrat is, in fact, insincere?)
While there is certainly some good, old-fashioned, trolling just for its own sake among atheists as elsewhere, the whole point of exercises like Pastafarianism, getting a driver's license with a colander on your head, Draw Mohammed Day, and the like is to corrode, by public display of irreverence, the great power of automatic deference traditionally enjoyed by assorted religious symbols.
Although geographically limited, there have been a few ad-buys on billboards or mass transit by secular groups.
And, for such terrifyingly vitriolic messages as "You can be good without god" and "Not a believer? You're not alone", they've had to go through a remarkable amount of flack...
Anybody not throwing their religion in my face could either be keeping quiet or not have one. Similarly, you can be pretty sure that smugly atheistic posts are posted by smug atheists; but you'll have a bit of trouble determining how many other posts are or are not posted by 'internet atheists' whose primary definition is not the god they don't believe in.
More to the point, two not clearly relevant statistics: People who merely proselytize in public, while somewhat irritating(and definitely nonzero in number), are making a basically harmless use of their rights to freedom of religion and speech. Similarly, 'internet atheists', while potentially obnoxious, are at worst a minor subcategory of the trolls of the WWW.
What counts is how efficiently well placed people throw their metaphysical positions, or the consequences thereof, into your face, your laws, or other aspects of your society. And on that metric, the news ain't pretty...
That is exactly the sentiment he was expressing(and the sentiment that Pastafarianism was originally founded to express: to came into being during the "teach the controversy" creationism period in the US, to demand that its own creation myth be included in official curricula, if other people's were, in order to show how ridiculous going down that path is...)
The law already makes the pandering exception for religious headwear in ID photos. This fellow chose a (quite successful, it's garnered headlines across the western world, if not further) protest-by-absurdity by demanding that his alleged precious religious sensibilities be respected, no matter how apparently ridiculous.
The same logic is behind his attempt to have Pastafarianism added to the list of officially recognized faiths in Austria. He isn't actually trying to ensure that His Noodlyness will see fit to allocate him a spot in the afterlife closer to the beer volcano, he is trying to demonstrate what happens when a civil society cowtows to any crazy shit that somebody declares to be an oh-so-important matter of 'faith'...
Good news. It's nice to see that Adobe is supporting Flash on Linux.
Having said that something seems fishy with the summary/article.
Adobe has been taking quite a bashing from Linux supporters of late. First, there was the issue of them dropping AIR for Linux and then came the bashing because of the lack of updates on the experimental 64-bit Flash for Linux.
Reads like a troll...
They have kept that promise.
...or a shill.
Not a serious issue, we can just go back to bashing them for sucking at software quality, which is the usual approach on the platforms they purport to support.
They would indeed be incompatible(and would, conceivably, trade at floating values against one another, forint style). My point was merely that while cryptographic currencies have the advantage of being essentially unforgeable(unlike, say, 1988 dollars, which the US Mint could conceivably print more of, if people started responding to inflationary pressures by valuing older bills more and only paying taxes in the new ones); but that there would be no particular obstacle to running any arbitrary number of Bitcoin chains concurrently(it might bloat the clients by a few hundred K; but who cares?). There is nothing magic about the starting constants of "the" bitcoin chain. If you wanted an inflationary policy in the world of bitcoins, you could just initiate new roots. Because individual bitcoins are cryptographically identifiable, you could not use the new roots to forge coins purporting to be from old ones, and so you couldn't easily force people to accept them; but you can have as many Bitcoin v. Ns as you wish to compute.
I'll be interested to see how they eventually deal with this one. If I had to bet, I'd wonder if they might take advantage of the fact that Android is architecturally 'I-Can't-believe-It's-Not-Java'(and apparently neither can Oracle...) and certainly no less suitable for browser embedding than their NaCL experiments are.
For devices with larger screens, enough RAM for serious, conventional, multitasking, etc. they could largely take ChromeOS as a starting point, use the chrome HTML/JS stuff for both web/webapps and to implement the various home screens/application launchers/ and other quasi 'window manager' stuff that Android uses, but have the full ability to run Android applications either as small elements plugged into larger pages or fullscreened. They'd need to give a bit of thought to a good mechanism for allowing web pages to modify/exchange data with their embedded Android elements, and vice-versa; but I could see it working pretty well.
While the 'pure' thin client is largely a loss outside of certain slightly paranoid corporate setups(even there, the "thin" client pretty much has to be a full PC running some lockdown OS, just so that you can replace your Citrix/etc. clients to keep up with protocol version churn...); you'd have to torture the truth pretty hard to argue that "the network" hasn't made some significant enroachments into "the computer".
The "thin" as in "For reasons best known to ourselves, we decided to use an expensive, slow, high-latency bus to transfer the contents of the framebuffer to the screen" client isn't doing so hot; but practically every corporate desktop boots, authenticates against a remote server, connects to a fileserver, and spends the rest of the day sending and receiving TPS reports through the mailserver. At home, the authentication is local, and only geeks have fileservers for their home directories; but a massive percentage of the use time consists of local software chewing on data going to/from the internet.
Architecturally, with local storage and CPU time so damn cheap, and administration of any level of strictness from "anarchic" to "Orwellian" getting easier over time, the notion of doing pure "framebuffer one way, peripherals the other way" 'thin client' computing requires some rather labored justification(and just add the desire for peripherals that aren't mice and keyboards to the mix... That fucking sucks); but the number of minutes that Joe User would spend in front of a computer, be it ever so well equipped with local software, that lacks internet access before wandering off to check his twitbook on some smartphone that at least has internet access has plummeted.
I agree, my point is merely that the fact that "the children!" manage to inspire some vague measure of resistance to the TSA, while adults don't really, is emotionally irrational and kind of sad. Yeah, children and frail old women dying of cancer and such are harmless; but they make perfectly good mules, so any 'improvement' that promises only to exclude them is simply PR window-dressing.
The issue with this "Chromebook", from my perspective, is that it manages to be as or more expensive(and no better in terms of battery life or weight/build quality) than an equivalent netbook/cheapie laptop.
If I can save money by buying something else and just running Chrome in full screen on Ubuntu or something, or don't get it.
I find Google's experiment conceptually interesting, and its continued evolution will be something to see; but in its present state(while I wouldn't turn a free one down) it doesn't seem to be worth any premium over whatever netbook is winning the knife-fight-in-a-telephone booth on price/performance today, just running a web browser most of the time.
Strictly speaking, Bitcoins are only kind of non-inflatable:
Each bitcoin is mathematically verifiable, so you can't just print a duplicate or 10,000 duplicates, and each chain yields only a finite number of them(presumably a slowly-shrinking pool; because some will be lost to bit-rot over time).
However, there isn't any particular reason why you couldn't start additional chains. The products of such would be distinguishable as children of different chains that the original bitcoins(just as many bills/coins have their year and origin printed on them, only cryptographically verifiable).
With the sole advantage of cryptographic security(which is certainly a nice feature) "Bitcoins are non-inflatable" is true in the same sense that "Dollars printed in 1988 are non-inflatable".
There's also the fact that only "resisting arrest" is actually a crime. If done sufficiently loudly, belligerence or swearing at people may constitute some sort of disorder(or if done sufficiently chronically, may constitute some sort of harassment/stalking); but swearing at authority figures is legal, even actual cops and feds, not just TSA trash. They generally don't like it, and it often brings out the ugliest side of their "discretion" in upholding the law; but that doesn't make it any less legal.
While the risk of "terrorists" is vastly overrated, and the TSA clowns would have fuck-all chance of catching one even if they were silly enough to try a uber-retro precise replay of an earlier attempt, there isn't any particular reason why a child is a worse place to stash some contraband than an adult(other than size, of course.)
The whole enterprise of gaterape as a security measure is flawed; but it isn't more flawed in children than it is in adults.
The question that I've often wondered about; but never been able to find any firm research on, is whether a defendant is (in terms of quality of legal process) better off being sentenced to death, rather than life without parole...
Because they are so controversial, and seen as so final, most capital cases undergo years of procedural wrangling, and some attract comparatively high-powered external assistance; but life sentences are comparatively boring, if not a whole lot more pleasant than death sentences, and have thus evolved fewer additional procedural safeguards.
And that would have protected against what happened here how?
The neighbor would have been able to use him as a source address for traffic -- but *not* to steal his usernames and passwords out of the air.
If one were to go to the trouble of using an internal VPN rather than standard wireless encryption, it would really make sense to go the one extra step and ensure that only traffic from the VPN tun device on the endpoint gets routed to the internet...
That would leave anybody who gets onto the wireless harmlessly twiddling their thumbs in some 192.186.1.* backwater until they figured out what VPN client to fire up and somehow obtained the credentials for it.
"The Cloud" is really just the latest advance in the relentless encroachment of "appliances", which are just the IT-specific implementation of the replacement of skilled tradesmen with capital-intensive systems and disposable peons that has already done a pretty good job in other industries.
You can replace thousands of jacks-of-many-trades smalltime sysadmins with a few architects and a bunch of screwdriver monkeys. ROI, here we come! (Even the confusion over what constitutes a "cloud" arguably shows the progression in finer detail: Things like EC2 only abstract away the hardware and interconnect stuff, while leaving you with the need for VM admins to actually turn the cloud into services. Things like Azure or Google's App whatever it is abstract away the sysadmins and leave you just needing the coders to write the applications. Hosted applications, webapps, 3rd-party email providers and the like abstract away the apps, and just leave you to point the client at the right URL. As soon as we all get our Chromebooks, we can fire everybody but the licensing person and the janitor, and each replacement laptop will automatically be provisioned according to the spreadsheet maintained by the licensing person as soon as the janitor plunks it on top of the RFID fob built into the desk...)
On the (very bleak) bright side, we might at least get to enjoy a little righteous schadenfreude when the axe comes for those techie-uber-libertarians who have spent years watching other peoples' creeping unemployment with the smug conviction that they are too good for that, and the peons can always retrain for the new jobs that the invisible hand of innovation will shortly be providing...
Just while we are on the subject, might as well point out that PCIe SSDs come in several rather different species:
The crudest(and generally cheapest) are essentially just a PCIe RAID controller, with the guts of two or more SATA SSDs soldered to the same board, or to daughtercards. Other than the SATA signals being routed over traces rather than cables, these are basically indistinguishable from discrete SSDs. If you are lucky, the vendor at least picked a RAID chipset nicer than whatever you were planning on using, if you are less lucky, not so much. At least you can boot off of them, and their capacities tend to be high.
Next up are architecturally similar to the previous; but with greater customization of the RAID firmware(possibly some degree of TRIM awareness/other SSD relevant considerations). Still basically the same; but not quite as rushed out the door.
Then you get the ones that are not, and don't bother to pretend to be, HDD controllers. These tend to be Very Expensive and not bootable; but they run like a bat with an expense account whose escape from hell depends on the speed of his Big Serious Database.
To the best of my understanding, the answer is "yes and no".
"No" in the sense that they don't go down the old tape-vendor route of "Hey, let's just arbitrarily assume that all customer data can be compressed by half and put a capacity number twice as large on the box!" bullshit, nor do they tempt madness and horrible OS/FS confusion by having apparent disk capacity fluctuate wildly depending on how compressible the data being written are.
"Yes" in the sense that the big challenge facing Flash SSD vendors is the fact that flash can be read in a neat, granular, manner; but can only be erased for re-writing in comparatively large blocks. This means that the controller chips need a RAM cache and/or some reserve Flash not included in the stated capacity, and some clever algorithmic juggling to queue up reads, writes, and rewrites such that the drive doesn't prematurely run out of space because it has all its blocks partially full and nowhere to store data while it consolidates, and such that its speeds remain as high as possible even as it has to occasionally perform slow read/cache/erase/consolidate/write operations to free up blocks. Apparently, the Sandforce controllers do some compression in order to make better use of their limited scratch space, so highly compressible demands will take longer to hit the point where they start grinding on the block consolidation, while incompressible ones will hit that point more or less as fast as their raw size would indicate.
Slashdot Mirror
The odds of a US born child of American parents being a radical Muslim extremist are fairly low; but being the flavor of the month doesn't make them the only consideration. Mr. McVeigh, for instance, was a somewhat explosive character, despite being pretty damn whitebread and a decorated veteran. One Theodore Kaczynski was also a solid, promising sort of chap, not exactly a wild-eyed fundamentalist from sand country...
He showed all apparent seriousness in the belief that the apocalyptic end of history was Coming Real Soon Now
What the fuck?
http://bible.cc/matthew/24-36.htm
“No one knows about that day or hour, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son,f but only the Father.
And, moments before in Matthew 24-34, "Verily I say unto you, This generation shall not pass, till all these things be fulfilled."
Unless you want to put the world "generation" on the rack and really get your exegesis on, he is providing a fairly tight upper bound. He is, as you say, explicitly saying that no more detailed information is available within that bound; but the passing of a generation, best case, is the work of just over a century. That doesn't tell you how to allocate your sick days in order to take advantage of the coming kingdom of god; but it qualifies as "Real Soon Now" by the standards of the end of history....
It's arguably a problem of mismatch between economically feasible granularity(ie. the lower bound on currency unit or quantity of goods you can trade without transaction costs devouring both parties) and the "natural" granularity that people expect from various classes of product.
In some cases, increased granularity actually solves the mismatch, and thus makes everybody happier(Intel only sells CPUs by the 1,000 unit tray. Ordinary people think in a 'natural' granularity three factors of ten smaller. Thankfully, there are middlemen willing to handle this discrepancy for a small fee...)
In other cases, however, increased granularity moves away from an existing match between the feasible and the 'natural' and makes things worse: In this(and a fair number of other) cases, the villain is DRM. Without it, things like books, games, etc. can pretty much only be sold in lumps. There are grey areas(did game X phone in the last episode to sell a sequel/expansion pack? is book Y worthless outside of its trilogy?); but the rough outlines of both 'natural' expectation and economically feasible expectation are basically set. If it isn't big enough to be worth pressing onto CDs and shipping to retail stores, it isn't a product, ergo, all products end up basically being finished products, with the possible exception of some free patches or a sequel/expansion pack also large enough to ship retail. Once you get a reasonably robust DRM framework, though, you can slice and dice material almost arbitrarily finely and at low cost. Unlocks, metering, limited use objects, etc, etc. can all be easily implemented even if everything has to be burned to disk ahead of time. Once downloads come into the mix, you have even more room to move.
Anybody who dares turn Pastafarianism into a real religion will never feel the blessings of His Noodley Appendage, nor shall his place in the afterlife be near the beer volcano!
As for Jesus, though, I'm not so sure. He was, quite arguably, much less of a prick than many who have acted in his name, what with that hippy charity and nonviolence stuff; but the available writings don't exactly paint a picture of a mellow dude who just wanted the ancient near east to chill out and be excellent to each other. He showed all apparent seriousness in the belief that the apocalyptic end of history was Coming Real Soon Now, which is pretty large-caliber religious enthusiasm.
In fact, I sometimes wonder if the transports of atrocious brutality that sometimes overtake his latter-day followers are not a product of frustration stemming from not sharing his confidence: The idea that the end of the world is at hand, with all about to be made right, is a powerful aid to both calm and benevolence. The horrible, sinking, feeling that you are going to face the long, slow, grind of unending history, one broken day at a time, on the other hand, leads either to resignation or to occasional orgies of ultraviolent reform...
Do you think that religion's utility as a smokescreen is unrelated to the degree of reverence that common opinion affords it? (or, for that matter, that every would-be theocrat is, in fact, insincere?)
While there is certainly some good, old-fashioned, trolling just for its own sake among atheists as elsewhere, the whole point of exercises like Pastafarianism, getting a driver's license with a colander on your head, Draw Mohammed Day, and the like is to corrode, by public display of irreverence, the great power of automatic deference traditionally enjoyed by assorted religious symbols.
Although geographically limited, there have been a few ad-buys on billboards or mass transit by secular groups.
And, for such terrifyingly vitriolic messages as "You can be good without god" and "Not a believer? You're not alone", they've had to go through a remarkable amount of flack...
Two virtually impossible to compile statistics:
Anybody not throwing their religion in my face could either be keeping quiet or not have one. Similarly, you can be pretty sure that smugly atheistic posts are posted by smug atheists; but you'll have a bit of trouble determining how many other posts are or are not posted by 'internet atheists' whose primary definition is not the god they don't believe in.
More to the point, two not clearly relevant statistics: People who merely proselytize in public, while somewhat irritating(and definitely nonzero in number), are making a basically harmless use of their rights to freedom of religion and speech. Similarly, 'internet atheists', while potentially obnoxious, are at worst a minor subcategory of the trolls of the WWW.
What counts is how efficiently well placed people throw their metaphysical positions, or the consequences thereof, into your face, your laws, or other aspects of your society. And on that metric, the news ain't pretty...
Those people, who ordinarily would keep their faith to themselves, get pissed off at the trolls and fight back.
You, er, might want to re-calibrate your sample...
That is exactly the sentiment he was expressing(and the sentiment that Pastafarianism was originally founded to express: to came into being during the "teach the controversy" creationism period in the US, to demand that its own creation myth be included in official curricula, if other people's were, in order to show how ridiculous going down that path is...)
The law already makes the pandering exception for religious headwear in ID photos. This fellow chose a (quite successful, it's garnered headlines across the western world, if not further) protest-by-absurdity by demanding that his alleged precious religious sensibilities be respected, no matter how apparently ridiculous.
The same logic is behind his attempt to have Pastafarianism added to the list of officially recognized faiths in Austria. He isn't actually trying to ensure that His Noodlyness will see fit to allocate him a spot in the afterlife closer to the beer volcano, he is trying to demonstrate what happens when a civil society cowtows to any crazy shit that somebody declares to be an oh-so-important matter of 'faith'...
The correct utterance for this occasion-most-touched-by-His-Noodly-Appendage is 'Ramen!'
Good news. It's nice to see that Adobe is supporting Flash on Linux.
Having said that something seems fishy with the summary/article.
Adobe has been taking quite a bashing from Linux supporters of late. First, there was the issue of them dropping AIR for Linux and then came the bashing because of the lack of updates on the experimental 64-bit Flash for Linux.
Reads like a troll...
They have kept that promise.
...or a shill.
Not a serious issue, we can just go back to bashing them for sucking at software quality, which is the usual approach on the platforms they purport to support.
They would indeed be incompatible(and would, conceivably, trade at floating values against one another, forint style). My point was merely that while cryptographic currencies have the advantage of being essentially unforgeable(unlike, say, 1988 dollars, which the US Mint could conceivably print more of, if people started responding to inflationary pressures by valuing older bills more and only paying taxes in the new ones); but that there would be no particular obstacle to running any arbitrary number of Bitcoin chains concurrently(it might bloat the clients by a few hundred K; but who cares?). There is nothing magic about the starting constants of "the" bitcoin chain. If you wanted an inflationary policy in the world of bitcoins, you could just initiate new roots. Because individual bitcoins are cryptographically identifiable, you could not use the new roots to forge coins purporting to be from old ones, and so you couldn't easily force people to accept them; but you can have as many Bitcoin v. Ns as you wish to compute.
I'll be interested to see how they eventually deal with this one. If I had to bet, I'd wonder if they might take advantage of the fact that Android is architecturally 'I-Can't-believe-It's-Not-Java'(and apparently neither can Oracle...) and certainly no less suitable for browser embedding than their NaCL experiments are.
For devices with larger screens, enough RAM for serious, conventional, multitasking, etc. they could largely take ChromeOS as a starting point, use the chrome HTML/JS stuff for both web/webapps and to implement the various home screens/application launchers/ and other quasi 'window manager' stuff that Android uses, but have the full ability to run Android applications either as small elements plugged into larger pages or fullscreened. They'd need to give a bit of thought to a good mechanism for allowing web pages to modify/exchange data with their embedded Android elements, and vice-versa; but I could see it working pretty well.
While the 'pure' thin client is largely a loss outside of certain slightly paranoid corporate setups(even there, the "thin" client pretty much has to be a full PC running some lockdown OS, just so that you can replace your Citrix/etc. clients to keep up with protocol version churn...); you'd have to torture the truth pretty hard to argue that "the network" hasn't made some significant enroachments into "the computer".
The "thin" as in "For reasons best known to ourselves, we decided to use an expensive, slow, high-latency bus to transfer the contents of the framebuffer to the screen" client isn't doing so hot; but practically every corporate desktop boots, authenticates against a remote server, connects to a fileserver, and spends the rest of the day sending and receiving TPS reports through the mailserver. At home, the authentication is local, and only geeks have fileservers for their home directories; but a massive percentage of the use time consists of local software chewing on data going to/from the internet.
Architecturally, with local storage and CPU time so damn cheap, and administration of any level of strictness from "anarchic" to "Orwellian" getting easier over time, the notion of doing pure "framebuffer one way, peripherals the other way" 'thin client' computing requires some rather labored justification(and just add the desire for peripherals that aren't mice and keyboards to the mix... That fucking sucks); but the number of minutes that Joe User would spend in front of a computer, be it ever so well equipped with local software, that lacks internet access before wandering off to check his twitbook on some smartphone that at least has internet access has plummeted.
I agree, my point is merely that the fact that "the children!" manage to inspire some vague measure of resistance to the TSA, while adults don't really, is emotionally irrational and kind of sad. Yeah, children and frail old women dying of cancer and such are harmless; but they make perfectly good mules, so any 'improvement' that promises only to exclude them is simply PR window-dressing.
The issue with this "Chromebook", from my perspective, is that it manages to be as or more expensive(and no better in terms of battery life or weight/build quality) than an equivalent netbook/cheapie laptop.
If I can save money by buying something else and just running Chrome in full screen on Ubuntu or something, or don't get it.
I find Google's experiment conceptually interesting, and its continued evolution will be something to see; but in its present state(while I wouldn't turn a free one down) it doesn't seem to be worth any premium over whatever netbook is winning the knife-fight-in-a-telephone booth on price/performance today, just running a web browser most of the time.
Strictly speaking, Bitcoins are only kind of non-inflatable:
Each bitcoin is mathematically verifiable, so you can't just print a duplicate or 10,000 duplicates, and each chain yields only a finite number of them(presumably a slowly-shrinking pool; because some will be lost to bit-rot over time).
However, there isn't any particular reason why you couldn't start additional chains. The products of such would be distinguishable as children of different chains that the original bitcoins(just as many bills/coins have their year and origin printed on them, only cryptographically verifiable).
With the sole advantage of cryptographic security(which is certainly a nice feature) "Bitcoins are non-inflatable" is true in the same sense that "Dollars printed in 1988 are non-inflatable".
There's also the fact that only "resisting arrest" is actually a crime. If done sufficiently loudly, belligerence or swearing at people may constitute some sort of disorder(or if done sufficiently chronically, may constitute some sort of harassment/stalking); but swearing at authority figures is legal, even actual cops and feds, not just TSA trash. They generally don't like it, and it often brings out the ugliest side of their "discretion" in upholding the law; but that doesn't make it any less legal.
She wasn't arrested for a refusing a patdown. She was arrested for being belligerent.
So, if she had been less uppity, and just known her place, none of this would have had to happen?
While the risk of "terrorists" is vastly overrated, and the TSA clowns would have fuck-all chance of catching one even if they were silly enough to try a uber-retro precise replay of an earlier attempt, there isn't any particular reason why a child is a worse place to stash some contraband than an adult(other than size, of course.)
The whole enterprise of gaterape as a security measure is flawed; but it isn't more flawed in children than it is in adults.
The question that I've often wondered about; but never been able to find any firm research on, is whether a defendant is (in terms of quality of legal process) better off being sentenced to death, rather than life without parole...
Because they are so controversial, and seen as so final, most capital cases undergo years of procedural wrangling, and some attract comparatively high-powered external assistance; but life sentences are comparatively boring, if not a whole lot more pleasant than death sentences, and have thus evolved fewer additional procedural safeguards.
The neighbor would have been able to use him as a source address for traffic -- but *not* to steal his usernames and passwords out of the air.
If one were to go to the trouble of using an internal VPN rather than standard wireless encryption, it would really make sense to go the one extra step and ensure that only traffic from the VPN tun device on the endpoint gets routed to the internet...
That would leave anybody who gets onto the wireless harmlessly twiddling their thumbs in some 192.186.1.* backwater until they figured out what VPN client to fire up and somehow obtained the credentials for it.
"The Cloud" is really just the latest advance in the relentless encroachment of "appliances", which are just the IT-specific implementation of the replacement of skilled tradesmen with capital-intensive systems and disposable peons that has already done a pretty good job in other industries.
You can replace thousands of jacks-of-many-trades smalltime sysadmins with a few architects and a bunch of screwdriver monkeys. ROI, here we come! (Even the confusion over what constitutes a "cloud" arguably shows the progression in finer detail: Things like EC2 only abstract away the hardware and interconnect stuff, while leaving you with the need for VM admins to actually turn the cloud into services. Things like Azure or Google's App whatever it is abstract away the sysadmins and leave you just needing the coders to write the applications. Hosted applications, webapps, 3rd-party email providers and the like abstract away the apps, and just leave you to point the client at the right URL. As soon as we all get our Chromebooks, we can fire everybody but the licensing person and the janitor, and each replacement laptop will automatically be provisioned according to the spreadsheet maintained by the licensing person as soon as the janitor plunks it on top of the RFID fob built into the desk...)
On the (very bleak) bright side, we might at least get to enjoy a little righteous schadenfreude when the axe comes for those techie-uber-libertarians who have spent years watching other peoples' creeping unemployment with the smug conviction that they are too good for that, and the peons can always retrain for the new jobs that the invisible hand of innovation will shortly be providing...
Just while we are on the subject, might as well point out that PCIe SSDs come in several rather different species:
The crudest(and generally cheapest) are essentially just a PCIe RAID controller, with the guts of two or more SATA SSDs soldered to the same board, or to daughtercards. Other than the SATA signals being routed over traces rather than cables, these are basically indistinguishable from discrete SSDs. If you are lucky, the vendor at least picked a RAID chipset nicer than whatever you were planning on using, if you are less lucky, not so much. At least you can boot off of them, and their capacities tend to be high.
Next up are architecturally similar to the previous; but with greater customization of the RAID firmware(possibly some degree of TRIM awareness/other SSD relevant considerations). Still basically the same; but not quite as rushed out the door.
Then you get the ones that are not, and don't bother to pretend to be, HDD controllers. These tend to be Very Expensive and not bootable; but they run like a bat with an expense account whose escape from hell depends on the speed of his Big Serious Database.
To the best of my understanding, the answer is "yes and no".
"No" in the sense that they don't go down the old tape-vendor route of "Hey, let's just arbitrarily assume that all customer data can be compressed by half and put a capacity number twice as large on the box!" bullshit, nor do they tempt madness and horrible OS/FS confusion by having apparent disk capacity fluctuate wildly depending on how compressible the data being written are.
"Yes" in the sense that the big challenge facing Flash SSD vendors is the fact that flash can be read in a neat, granular, manner; but can only be erased for re-writing in comparatively large blocks. This means that the controller chips need a RAM cache and/or some reserve Flash not included in the stated capacity, and some clever algorithmic juggling to queue up reads, writes, and rewrites such that the drive doesn't prematurely run out of space because it has all its blocks partially full and nowhere to store data while it consolidates, and such that its speeds remain as high as possible even as it has to occasionally perform slow read/cache/erase/consolidate/write operations to free up blocks. Apparently, the Sandforce controllers do some compression in order to make better use of their limited scratch space, so highly compressible demands will take longer to hit the point where they start grinding on the block consolidation, while incompressible ones will hit that point more or less as fast as their raw size would indicate.