It's an interesting question: On the one hand, every medical procedure is experimental at some point and a statistically powerful population of poor suckers biting the bullet is the only way that that changes. On the other hand, infertility treatments are arguably 'elective' and place the hypothetical child at risk.
Unfortunately, this brings us right into the deep end of the dubiously possible business of trying to talk sensibly about the moral interests of entities that only hypothetically exist. Any decision to procreate, by whatever means, necessarily exposes the child that may eventually be produced to a set of risks. The level of risk runs from "almost certain to go about as well as it ever does for a human before their inevitable death" to "just plain fucked from day one"; but it is always there. Unfortunately, you can't exactly ask an entity that doesn't exist yet whether it would like to or not, nor can you be especially confident in talking about whether or not a nonexistent entity would consider existence to be a good that is worth the risk. Since it suits us, we generally just go for it.
I suspect that the patient in question is further along the fetal risk continuum than one would like; but they are hardly alone in that rather sticky question. What level of risk is acceptable? What level of risk is ethically questionable but within their rights? Is there a level of risk at which attempts to procreate would amount to a sort of premeditated abuse of a child, or a kind of negligent homicide?
Unless she is planning on doing some reasonably serious spawning, 'eventually' won't be a deal-killing problem. Unlike a donor heart or something, it just has to last long enough to produce the desired number of children.
In that vein, I'd be curious to know if there are any special complexities, compared to other organs, with immune reactions in-utero. Embryos, after all, are aggressively expanding foreign organisms; but any species whose immune system suppressed them wouldn't be in the running for long(not only that; but egg-donor produced embryos are entirely unrelated to the person carrying them and even those don't seem to get exterminated by the maternal immune system)...
On the one hand, Apple is typically very unlikely to promise a given feature on the box and not ship it, or show of a prototype before it is already in production. If anything, they tend in the opposite direction, being as tight-lipped as possible about upcoming plans and publicly rubbishing product categories that they don't consider sufficiently mature.
On the other hand, if you observe the history of changes in iOS devices since their debut, the number of features that started out missing(including minor niceties like cut and paste, and 3rd party applications that had been around for years on other platforms) and "came in a future update" is pretty large.
Either way, Samsung is in sort of a bad spot, since playing catch-up makes what you haven't delivered yet much more galling for the potential customer.
Arguably, with the existence of tools like the "Google web toolkit" and its analogs, which let you do the writing in some other language and then convert it to javascript for deployment in-browser, I suspect that javascript's sins against developers will become somewhat less relevant. Admittedly, it almost certainly isn't what you would design if you were asked to design a platform-independent intermediate representation for complex programs; but it is pretty much the only platform-independent intermediate representation for complex programs that you can be fairly sure that any idiot can "install" just by typing something into a browser bar...
It would have been nice if something better had been standardized; but your options pretty much break down into "javascript" or "assorted architecturally superior; but single-platform and/or deeply fucked in the code quality plugins".
I do realize that. My point was that, as Silverlight has evolved, market demands have been moving it back toward a (less-broken); but much more ActiveX-esque and potentially dangerous set of capabilities than it previously had. It isn't enabled by default for joe user anymore, because they learned that lesson; but the more fundamental problem isn't a lesson to be learned: If you want power, and people certainly do, programs have to have access. If programs have access, you either have to trust them implicitly(both not to be malicious and not to fuck up in serious ways) or increase the amount of your system to which you devote serious time and attention to vetting.
In this case, I'm sure that important customer groups cried out for the features they are announcing for version 5. Certain line-of-business applications probably couldn't be built without them. However, as a side effect, they've basically had to drag back in(at least optionally, this time), the ability to do absolutely anything the user's security context allows.
In fairness to Microsoft, I strongly suspect that they are entirely correct when they say that running untrusted OpenGL code is currently a security clusterfuck of epic proportions. I certainly won't be touching WebGL, outside of specific trusted cases, for some time to come.
It's just that I don't see how the situation will ever improve, on the driver, firmware, possibly I/O MMU availability, etc. sides unless people start rumbling about how they Really. Do. Want. to be able to do this, and that it will have to be a consideration in future designs.
In much the same way, the OS security models that grew up in the days of non-networked single user systems were absolutely hopeless; but it wasn't as though there were on track to improve through some kind of magic that would allow us to just wait patiently until they were mature before hooking them up. It took market pressure for security to become a feature(at least in theory) rather than a cost center. Hopefully the tightening up of OpenGL will be a cleaner, less harrowing process; but it isn't as though it is happening in the current absence of outside pressure...
"Access devices and other system capabilities by calling into application COM components."
"Call existing unmanaged code directly from within Silverlight with PInvoke."
"Read and write files to the user’s My Documents folder, making it easier to find media files or create local copies of reports.
Launch Microsoft Office and other desktop programs. Users can open Microsoft Outlook and create an e-mail message, or send a report to Word utilizing the power of Office."
They just couldn't stay away from the convenience that ActiveX plugins' "me casa es tu casa" security model provided...
I'm not really arguing for the viability of 'conventional' biofuels(ie. ones that are rivalrous with food crops, people growing algae in tubes on sterile salt-flats are really just doing 'photovoltaics by other means'), I was just, by means of slightly gallows humor, noting that oppression and death in the service of obtaining biofuels would really just be an extension of the way fossil fuels, and mineral resources in general, are frequently obtained today.
Although they are conveniently long enough that we don't have to look at them, you can usually find a bunch of human-tragedy cases shackled to any supply chain.
It is hard to argue with the thesis that allowing a webpage to run OpenGL code on the system GPU is less secure(and places security in more hands) than not doing so. However, that seems to throw us back on the more basic problem:
Allowing the internet to do things to your machine is dangerous. It is also among the top reasons why most people bother to own a computer. Letting pages run Javascript opens you up to vulnerabilities in your JS engine. Support for images in webpages means that a bug in any of your image format renderers(and there have been a few of these) will allow the attacker to own you. Even HTML rendering isn't safe. People from the internet are running code on your CPU, through assorted layers of indirection, virtually continually... We put up with this blatantly dangerous situation because we want the functionality.
Other than the (im)maturity of OpenGL as something that is subject to maliciously crafted input, rather than just error by well-meaning application designers, I'm not seeing a fundamental difference. Everything that happens in your browser happens because filthy, possibly dangerous, 3rd party instructions are executed, through some number of intermediate interpreters and libraries and codecs, right on your hardware.
Now, I can definitely see the case to be made for "You really shouldn't enable WebGL, except for websites that you would also trust enough to download and execute with admin permissions executables from, until the OpenGL ecosystem has had time to finish wetting itself from pure fear and start improving things", it is quite likely the case that the large, complex, more-focused-on-speed-than-security, mass that is GPU firmware, GPU drivers, etc is a mass of potentially serious issues, having historically been sheltered from the more hostile side of things. However, that doesn't seem fundamentally different from the state of the stack sitting on top of the CPU that was inherited from a more innocent time before widespread network malice. Ultimately, we just had to fix that; because the alternative involved not being able to do what we wanted to do.
If the US used every acre of cropland for biofuel feedstock production it would only be able to produce 40% of transportation fuel needs and then there'd be nothing to eat! It's impossible to make even a dent in fossil fuel usage with biofuels, and by trying we will make food more expensive for everyone and reduce the surplus that helps to feed the world's poor.
Hmm... Sounds like we need to shift our focus from propping up friendly puppet despots in oil-producing regions and start propping them up in agriculturally productive ones... Rising food prices(and a bit of judicious repression, good for the defense industry) should ensure a steady supply of squalid, desperate peasant labor to work the biofuel fields. We can't eat our cake and drive it too; but eating our cake and driving theirs is eminently possible...
Ethanol subsidies are, pretty much, purely about buying votes in flyover country; but your distinction between food and fuel is somewhat artificial. Essentially all fossil fuels are 'biofuels' that have been taking a dirt nap long enough to be unpalatable; the only real advantage is that, at the price of additional extraction costs, we can spend down millenia of Cambrian biofuel production with a few weeks of digging and blasting.
Corn is a particularly terrible biofuel crop, being fertilizer intensive and directly useful as a human food source; but the notion of using cheap, self-replicating, fairly efficent solar collecting organisms to generate energy isn't all that nonsensical. Photovoltaics have the advantage of being usable in areas without enough water for agriculture, and some breakthroughs in algae and the various other possible candidates that will grow in saltwater, on marginal land, and in other convenient places would be nice; but every source of energy on earth(save nuclear and geothermal) is pretty much an exercise in more-or-less direct solar energy collection. Plants are pretty good at that.
I would(given ATI's historically somewhat weak driver team) be wholly unsurprised to see some rather messy teething pains; but(given AMD's historical friendliness, and the long-term trajectory of this plan), I suspect that it will actually be a boon to Linux and similar.
The long term plan, it appears, would be to integrate the GPU sufficiently tightly with the CPU that it becomes, in effect, an instruction-set extension specialized for certain tasks, like SSE on steroids. If they reach that point, you'll basically have a CPU where running OpenGL "in software" is the same as running it "in hardware" on the embedded graphics board, because the embedded graphics board is simply the hardware implementation of some of the available CPU instructions, along with a few displayport interfaces and some monitor-management housekeeping.
I'd be unsurprised, as with Optimus, to see some laptops released with an embedded/discrete GPU combination that is fucked in one way or another under anything that isn't the latest Windows, possibly making the discrete invisible, possibly forcing you to run the discrete all the time, or some other dysfunctional situation; but I'd tend to be optimistic about the long term: GPU driver support has always been a sore spot. Compiler support for CPU instructions, on the other hand, has generally been pretty good.
Also, nothing about AMD's new design precludes discrete GPUs more or less similar to today's models, it is just an effort to make the (economically inevitable) integrated GPU more useful by virtue of its close integration with the system, rather than simply cheaper as integrated GPUs are today.
Expansion will be slightly trickier than today's Crossfire/SLI, because certain GPU elements(while comparatively few) will enjoy much faster access to the CPU and main memory, while the expansion GPU(s) will presumably have many more elements, and their own pool of RAM; but be a PCIe bus away from the CPU. I'm sure that the beta drivers and the edge cases will be pretty dire; but it will eventually be worked out.
Given that the attacker, unless a total putz, probably covered his tracks at least reasonably well, and given that the victim is nobody in particular, I also would be surprised to see much effort put into the case.
That said, while I doubt that the feds have much interest in bitcoins qua currency, it is hardly the case that "hackers stealing data that possess value based more or less on people's belief that they do" isn't something you can interest the feds in. It would be a fun test case, for instance, to see if bitcoin secret keys could qualify as "Trade Secrets", in which case stealing them would be fairly serious business, state and federal.
If team bitcoin wants to succeed a necessary(but not sufficient) measure will be the development and reasonably easy and inexpensive availability of a suitable keystore peripheral.
For PKI purposes, the use of specialized storage modules has(at least for very high value keys in setups run by the competent) been going on for years. For bitcoin, you'd need something somewhat similar; but cheaper, easier to use, and better adapted for transaction purposes.
Any desktop OS (and most home/casual server computers and backup schemes or lack thereof) Just Isn't Suitable for the storage of data that are worth much of anything. Even if the hackers don't get you(and for ~$500,000 a mere absence of remote holes attackable with off-the-shelf toolkits won't necessarily save you, that is getting well into personal-attention-from-one-or-more-competent-operators territory...) an HDD crash, corrupted backup, house fire, etc. might.
At a minimum, you really want your keystore to be a separate, small footprint, device that accepts bitcoin payments, and can listen to requests to issue payments; but allows the user to review the requested payment(size and target) on an independent display and confirm/deny it on an independent keypad.
Unfortunately, bitcoin's rather clever cryptographic architecture just isn't as secure as the math suggests so long as the private keys are being stored in pitifully insecure ways. On a large scale, we've seen goofy crap like MMORPG logins being stolen automatically by assorted malware. If bitcoins achieve some measure of popularity and value, it won't be long before wallet.dats are being cleaned out in the same way, with especially high-net-worth targets being attacked personally.
I found a chipmunk nesting in the box of Krugerrands under my bed, next to my gun safe; but there were only a few nibbles, and no material appears to have been removed.
Mostly because the picture is pretty, I'll note that cache was technically on package; but separate die, though it ran at full core speed and had many of the features that later on-die caches would have, making it pretty glaringly superior to the old on-motherboard cache RAM. The 1MB version even had 3 dice embedded in the same package, no wonder it cost so much...
This arrangement also made the PII-based "overdrive" upgrade card look kind of weird(more or less normal PII on the left, cache on the right).
Walmart, among others, has periodically run into legal trouble over exactly how adherent-to-patent licensing some of their cheaper DVD offerings are...
Given that DVD, in particular, is sufficiently well understood that licensing patents/paying your CSS protection money, etc. are purely legal matters, not technological issues, you can indeed get the new-brand-every-week DVD players for more or less the cost of mechanics, silicon, and box. That doesn't really help Nintendo, though, who will have lawyers on their tail faster than they can blink if they try anything.
"HP's the very model of a modern multinational,
their expertise confined to MBAs and quibblers contractual,
the rest's been outsourced from Shenzhen to Hyderabad,
a plan that makes none but investors glad,
seeking strategies for how to make their systems worse,
they gobbled up Compaq with the power of their purse,
and after they had freed themselves of ghastly Fiorina,
she left the private sector to afflict the state of California."
With deepest apologies(not to be construed as admission of wrongdoing) to Gilbert and Sullivan.
Itanium isn't widely used; but its users would appear to punch well above their weight when it comes to willingness to pay. Apparently, Intel does ~4 billion a year in sales of the thing. Now, I suspect that continued development is costly enough that Intel would be much happier if they could convince everybody that "Xeon; but with the RAS features not lasered out and for 20x the price!!!" is the way to go; but the sort of people who spend huge amounts, per unit performance, on fairly obscure architectures are exactly the sort of people who Do. Not. Want. to switch architectures.
Intel and its remaining Itanium buddies(yeah, HP, that pretty much means you...) are in the unpleasant situation of having a product line that is too big to just drop; but likely much more expensive than they would like to keep remotely near performance parity with x86 and with a customer base that is unlikely to just quietly accept an architecture switch in the near future. HP's situation is, of course, rather worse than Intel's... since whenever the ship finally sinks, so do HP's remaining offerings in the "architecturally better than boring x86" niche. IBM will still have POWER, Oracle will have at least the option of carrying SPARC forward, Dell will still have rock-bottom prices...
Why is suicide illegal? The good, if not exactly cheerful, Arthur Schopenhauer has the best stab at an answer I've been able to find.
"The extraordinary energy and zeal with which the clergy of monotheistic religions attack suicide is not supported either by any passages in the Bible or by any considerations of weight; so that it looks as though they must have some secret reason for their contention. May it not be this — that the voluntary surrender of life is a bad compliment for him who said that all things were very good ? If this is so, it offers another instance of the crass optimism of these religions,— denouncing suicide to escape being denounced by it."
IFF the legalization of suicide goes down the (arguably wrongheaded) path of trying to carve out a series of intricate categories about who is and who isn't eligible...
A simple "competent adults, should they so chose" cuts through that reasonably quickly. As for neglect, ugly little not-so-secret is that people already get neglected, up to and including the point of death, if they don't attract support. On the outpatient side, you can usually find some examples sleeping on the steam vents if you live in a reasonably urban area. Inpatient, let's just say that nursing homes and juvenile detention facilities don't write so many scripts for sedatives and antipsychotics with sedative effects because it makes life harder for the staff...
While western civilization is certainly doing its part to invent the dystopian future, I'm really not seeing it here.
An adult gives his informed consent to appear in a documentary about assisted suicide, in order to stimulate national discussion(and presumably advocate for his side against the current ban) of the individual's right to make medical choices according to their perceived good. Horribly, the documentary included a section chronicling the (not unmixed) aspects of the process, the emotional difficulties, and so forth.
Umm. Ok? Person dies the death they chose, to avoid an outcome they considered worse, and voluntarily appears in a documentary about that. That hardly seems like moral decline... compared to the fairly-recent-history of horrible death by untreatable disease, barbaric executions carried out as public entertainment, a few bouts of genocide, rampant lynchings(at the better of which, one could purchase commemerative photographs...) and so on and so forth.
Even if you consider assisted suicide morally equivallent to outright murder, the idea that western civilization is somehow inching its way up the murder-ometer is empirically nutty. The 20th century is a tough act to follow. If you don't hew to such a view, the idea that this is somehow a depraved occurrence becomes even harder to justify...
I'm somewhat inclined to wonder if this is just part of some terrifyingly value-rational spreadsheet junkie's byzantine plan to manipulate the market in refined-fictionalonium futures or something of the sort...
Slashdot Mirror
It's an interesting question: On the one hand, every medical procedure is experimental at some point and a statistically powerful population of poor suckers biting the bullet is the only way that that changes. On the other hand, infertility treatments are arguably 'elective' and place the hypothetical child at risk.
Unfortunately, this brings us right into the deep end of the dubiously possible business of trying to talk sensibly about the moral interests of entities that only hypothetically exist. Any decision to procreate, by whatever means, necessarily exposes the child that may eventually be produced to a set of risks. The level of risk runs from "almost certain to go about as well as it ever does for a human before their inevitable death" to "just plain fucked from day one"; but it is always there. Unfortunately, you can't exactly ask an entity that doesn't exist yet whether it would like to or not, nor can you be especially confident in talking about whether or not a nonexistent entity would consider existence to be a good that is worth the risk. Since it suits us, we generally just go for it.
I suspect that the patient in question is further along the fetal risk continuum than one would like; but they are hardly alone in that rather sticky question. What level of risk is acceptable? What level of risk is ethically questionable but within their rights? Is there a level of risk at which attempts to procreate would amount to a sort of premeditated abuse of a child, or a kind of negligent homicide?
Unless she is planning on doing some reasonably serious spawning, 'eventually' won't be a deal-killing problem. Unlike a donor heart or something, it just has to last long enough to produce the desired number of children.
In that vein, I'd be curious to know if there are any special complexities, compared to other organs, with immune reactions in-utero. Embryos, after all, are aggressively expanding foreign organisms; but any species whose immune system suppressed them wouldn't be in the running for long(not only that; but egg-donor produced embryos are entirely unrelated to the person carrying them and even those don't seem to get exterminated by the maternal immune system)...
It depends on how you judge them, really.
On the one hand, Apple is typically very unlikely to promise a given feature on the box and not ship it, or show of a prototype before it is already in production. If anything, they tend in the opposite direction, being as tight-lipped as possible about upcoming plans and publicly rubbishing product categories that they don't consider sufficiently mature.
On the other hand, if you observe the history of changes in iOS devices since their debut, the number of features that started out missing(including minor niceties like cut and paste, and 3rd party applications that had been around for years on other platforms) and "came in a future update" is pretty large.
Either way, Samsung is in sort of a bad spot, since playing catch-up makes what you haven't delivered yet much more galling for the potential customer.
Arguably, with the existence of tools like the "Google web toolkit" and its analogs, which let you do the writing in some other language and then convert it to javascript for deployment in-browser, I suspect that javascript's sins against developers will become somewhat less relevant. Admittedly, it almost certainly isn't what you would design if you were asked to design a platform-independent intermediate representation for complex programs; but it is pretty much the only platform-independent intermediate representation for complex programs that you can be fairly sure that any idiot can "install" just by typing something into a browser bar...
It would have been nice if something better had been standardized; but your options pretty much break down into "javascript" or "assorted architecturally superior; but single-platform and/or deeply fucked in the code quality plugins".
I do realize that. My point was that, as Silverlight has evolved, market demands have been moving it back toward a (less-broken); but much more ActiveX-esque and potentially dangerous set of capabilities than it previously had. It isn't enabled by default for joe user anymore, because they learned that lesson; but the more fundamental problem isn't a lesson to be learned: If you want power, and people certainly do, programs have to have access. If programs have access, you either have to trust them implicitly(both not to be malicious and not to fuck up in serious ways) or increase the amount of your system to which you devote serious time and attention to vetting.
In this case, I'm sure that important customer groups cried out for the features they are announcing for version 5. Certain line-of-business applications probably couldn't be built without them. However, as a side effect, they've basically had to drag back in(at least optionally, this time), the ability to do absolutely anything the user's security context allows.
In fairness to Microsoft, I strongly suspect that they are entirely correct when they say that running untrusted OpenGL code is currently a security clusterfuck of epic proportions. I certainly won't be touching WebGL, outside of specific trusted cases, for some time to come.
It's just that I don't see how the situation will ever improve, on the driver, firmware, possibly I/O MMU availability, etc. sides unless people start rumbling about how they Really. Do. Want. to be able to do this, and that it will have to be a consideration in future designs.
In much the same way, the OS security models that grew up in the days of non-networked single user systems were absolutely hopeless; but it wasn't as though there were on track to improve through some kind of magic that would allow us to just wait patiently until they were mature before hooking them up. It took market pressure for security to become a feature(at least in theory) rather than a cost center. Hopefully the tightening up of OpenGL will be a cleaner, less harrowing process; but it isn't as though it is happening in the current absence of outside pressure...
Under "Extended Features":
"Access devices and other system capabilities by calling into application COM components."
"Call existing unmanaged code directly from within Silverlight with PInvoke."
"Read and write files to the user’s My Documents folder, making it easier to find media files or create local copies of reports. Launch Microsoft Office and other desktop programs. Users can open Microsoft Outlook and create an e-mail message, or send a report to Word utilizing the power of Office."
They just couldn't stay away from the convenience that ActiveX plugins' "me casa es tu casa" security model provided...
I'm not really arguing for the viability of 'conventional' biofuels(ie. ones that are rivalrous with food crops, people growing algae in tubes on sterile salt-flats are really just doing 'photovoltaics by other means'), I was just, by means of slightly gallows humor, noting that oppression and death in the service of obtaining biofuels would really just be an extension of the way fossil fuels, and mineral resources in general, are frequently obtained today.
Although they are conveniently long enough that we don't have to look at them, you can usually find a bunch of human-tragedy cases shackled to any supply chain.
It is hard to argue with the thesis that allowing a webpage to run OpenGL code on the system GPU is less secure(and places security in more hands) than not doing so. However, that seems to throw us back on the more basic problem:
Allowing the internet to do things to your machine is dangerous. It is also among the top reasons why most people bother to own a computer. Letting pages run Javascript opens you up to vulnerabilities in your JS engine. Support for images in webpages means that a bug in any of your image format renderers(and there have been a few of these) will allow the attacker to own you. Even HTML rendering isn't safe. People from the internet are running code on your CPU, through assorted layers of indirection, virtually continually... We put up with this blatantly dangerous situation because we want the functionality.
Other than the (im)maturity of OpenGL as something that is subject to maliciously crafted input, rather than just error by well-meaning application designers, I'm not seeing a fundamental difference. Everything that happens in your browser happens because filthy, possibly dangerous, 3rd party instructions are executed, through some number of intermediate interpreters and libraries and codecs, right on your hardware.
Now, I can definitely see the case to be made for "You really shouldn't enable WebGL, except for websites that you would also trust enough to download and execute with admin permissions executables from, until the OpenGL ecosystem has had time to finish wetting itself from pure fear and start improving things", it is quite likely the case that the large, complex, more-focused-on-speed-than-security, mass that is GPU firmware, GPU drivers, etc is a mass of potentially serious issues, having historically been sheltered from the more hostile side of things. However, that doesn't seem fundamentally different from the state of the stack sitting on top of the CPU that was inherited from a more innocent time before widespread network malice. Ultimately, we just had to fix that; because the alternative involved not being able to do what we wanted to do.
If the US used every acre of cropland for biofuel feedstock production it would only be able to produce 40% of transportation fuel needs and then there'd be nothing to eat! It's impossible to make even a dent in fossil fuel usage with biofuels, and by trying we will make food more expensive for everyone and reduce the surplus that helps to feed the world's poor.
Hmm... Sounds like we need to shift our focus from propping up friendly puppet despots in oil-producing regions and start propping them up in agriculturally productive ones... Rising food prices(and a bit of judicious repression, good for the defense industry) should ensure a steady supply of squalid, desperate peasant labor to work the biofuel fields. We can't eat our cake and drive it too; but eating our cake and driving theirs is eminently possible...
Ethanol subsidies are, pretty much, purely about buying votes in flyover country; but your distinction between food and fuel is somewhat artificial. Essentially all fossil fuels are 'biofuels' that have been taking a dirt nap long enough to be unpalatable; the only real advantage is that, at the price of additional extraction costs, we can spend down millenia of Cambrian biofuel production with a few weeks of digging and blasting.
Corn is a particularly terrible biofuel crop, being fertilizer intensive and directly useful as a human food source; but the notion of using cheap, self-replicating, fairly efficent solar collecting organisms to generate energy isn't all that nonsensical. Photovoltaics have the advantage of being usable in areas without enough water for agriculture, and some breakthroughs in algae and the various other possible candidates that will grow in saltwater, on marginal land, and in other convenient places would be nice; but every source of energy on earth(save nuclear and geothermal) is pretty much an exercise in more-or-less direct solar energy collection. Plants are pretty good at that.
I would(given ATI's historically somewhat weak driver team) be wholly unsurprised to see some rather messy teething pains; but(given AMD's historical friendliness, and the long-term trajectory of this plan), I suspect that it will actually be a boon to Linux and similar.
The long term plan, it appears, would be to integrate the GPU sufficiently tightly with the CPU that it becomes, in effect, an instruction-set extension specialized for certain tasks, like SSE on steroids. If they reach that point, you'll basically have a CPU where running OpenGL "in software" is the same as running it "in hardware" on the embedded graphics board, because the embedded graphics board is simply the hardware implementation of some of the available CPU instructions, along with a few displayport interfaces and some monitor-management housekeeping.
I'd be unsurprised, as with Optimus, to see some laptops released with an embedded/discrete GPU combination that is fucked in one way or another under anything that isn't the latest Windows, possibly making the discrete invisible, possibly forcing you to run the discrete all the time, or some other dysfunctional situation; but I'd tend to be optimistic about the long term: GPU driver support has always been a sore spot. Compiler support for CPU instructions, on the other hand, has generally been pretty good.
Also, nothing about AMD's new design precludes discrete GPUs more or less similar to today's models, it is just an effort to make the (economically inevitable) integrated GPU more useful by virtue of its close integration with the system, rather than simply cheaper as integrated GPUs are today.
Expansion will be slightly trickier than today's Crossfire/SLI, because certain GPU elements(while comparatively few) will enjoy much faster access to the CPU and main memory, while the expansion GPU(s) will presumably have many more elements, and their own pool of RAM; but be a PCIe bus away from the CPU. I'm sure that the beta drivers and the edge cases will be pretty dire; but it will eventually be worked out.
Given that the attacker, unless a total putz, probably covered his tracks at least reasonably well, and given that the victim is nobody in particular, I also would be surprised to see much effort put into the case.
That said, while I doubt that the feds have much interest in bitcoins qua currency, it is hardly the case that "hackers stealing data that possess value based more or less on people's belief that they do" isn't something you can interest the feds in. It would be a fun test case, for instance, to see if bitcoin secret keys could qualify as "Trade Secrets", in which case stealing them would be fairly serious business, state and federal.
If team bitcoin wants to succeed a necessary(but not sufficient) measure will be the development and reasonably easy and inexpensive availability of a suitable keystore peripheral.
For PKI purposes, the use of specialized storage modules has(at least for very high value keys in setups run by the competent) been going on for years. For bitcoin, you'd need something somewhat similar; but cheaper, easier to use, and better adapted for transaction purposes.
Any desktop OS (and most home/casual server computers and backup schemes or lack thereof) Just Isn't Suitable for the storage of data that are worth much of anything. Even if the hackers don't get you(and for ~$500,000 a mere absence of remote holes attackable with off-the-shelf toolkits won't necessarily save you, that is getting well into personal-attention-from-one-or-more-competent-operators territory...) an HDD crash, corrupted backup, house fire, etc. might.
At a minimum, you really want your keystore to be a separate, small footprint, device that accepts bitcoin payments, and can listen to requests to issue payments; but allows the user to review the requested payment(size and target) on an independent display and confirm/deny it on an independent keypad.
Unfortunately, bitcoin's rather clever cryptographic architecture just isn't as secure as the math suggests so long as the private keys are being stored in pitifully insecure ways. On a large scale, we've seen goofy crap like MMORPG logins being stolen automatically by assorted malware. If bitcoins achieve some measure of popularity and value, it won't be long before wallet.dats are being cleaned out in the same way, with especially high-net-worth targets being attacked personally.
I found a chipmunk nesting in the box of Krugerrands under my bed, next to my gun safe; but there were only a few nibbles, and no material appears to have been removed.
Mostly because the picture is pretty, I'll note that cache was technically on package; but separate die, though it ran at full core speed and had many of the features that later on-die caches would have, making it pretty glaringly superior to the old on-motherboard cache RAM. The 1MB version even had 3 dice embedded in the same package, no wonder it cost so much...
This arrangement also made the PII-based "overdrive" upgrade card look kind of weird(more or less normal PII on the left, cache on the right).
Walmart, among others, has periodically run into legal trouble over exactly how adherent-to-patent licensing some of their cheaper DVD offerings are...
Given that DVD, in particular, is sufficiently well understood that licensing patents/paying your CSS protection money, etc. are purely legal matters, not technological issues, you can indeed get the new-brand-every-week DVD players for more or less the cost of mechanics, silicon, and box. That doesn't really help Nintendo, though, who will have lawyers on their tail faster than they can blink if they try anything.
I believe that you mean:
"HP's the very model of a modern multinational,
their expertise confined to MBAs and quibblers contractual,
the rest's been outsourced from Shenzhen to Hyderabad,
a plan that makes none but investors glad,
seeking strategies for how to make their systems worse,
they gobbled up Compaq with the power of their purse,
and after they had freed themselves of ghastly Fiorina,
she left the private sector to afflict the state of California."
With deepest apologies(not to be construed as admission of wrongdoing) to Gilbert and Sullivan.
Itanium isn't widely used; but its users would appear to punch well above their weight when it comes to willingness to pay. Apparently, Intel does ~4 billion a year in sales of the thing. Now, I suspect that continued development is costly enough that Intel would be much happier if they could convince everybody that "Xeon; but with the RAS features not lasered out and for 20x the price!!!" is the way to go; but the sort of people who spend huge amounts, per unit performance, on fairly obscure architectures are exactly the sort of people who Do. Not. Want. to switch architectures.
Intel and its remaining Itanium buddies(yeah, HP, that pretty much means you...) are in the unpleasant situation of having a product line that is too big to just drop; but likely much more expensive than they would like to keep remotely near performance parity with x86 and with a customer base that is unlikely to just quietly accept an architecture switch in the near future. HP's situation is, of course, rather worse than Intel's... since whenever the ship finally sinks, so do HP's remaining offerings in the "architecturally better than boring x86" niche. IBM will still have POWER, Oracle will have at least the option of carrying SPARC forward, Dell will still have rock-bottom prices...
Why is suicide illegal? The good, if not exactly cheerful, Arthur Schopenhauer has the best stab at an answer I've been able to find.
"The extraordinary energy and zeal with which the clergy of monotheistic religions attack suicide is not supported either by any passages in the Bible or by any considerations of weight; so that it looks as though they must have some secret reason for their contention. May it not be this — that the voluntary surrender of life is a bad compliment for him who said that all things were very good ? If this is so, it offers another instance of the crass optimism of these religions,— denouncing suicide to escape being denounced by it."
IFF the legalization of suicide goes down the (arguably wrongheaded) path of trying to carve out a series of intricate categories about who is and who isn't eligible...
A simple "competent adults, should they so chose" cuts through that reasonably quickly. As for neglect, ugly little not-so-secret is that people already get neglected, up to and including the point of death, if they don't attract support. On the outpatient side, you can usually find some examples sleeping on the steam vents if you live in a reasonably urban area. Inpatient, let's just say that nursing homes and juvenile detention facilities don't write so many scripts for sedatives and antipsychotics with sedative effects because it makes life harder for the staff...
While western civilization is certainly doing its part to invent the dystopian future, I'm really not seeing it here.
An adult gives his informed consent to appear in a documentary about assisted suicide, in order to stimulate national discussion(and presumably advocate for his side against the current ban) of the individual's right to make medical choices according to their perceived good. Horribly, the documentary included a section chronicling the (not unmixed) aspects of the process, the emotional difficulties, and so forth.
Umm. Ok? Person dies the death they chose, to avoid an outcome they considered worse, and voluntarily appears in a documentary about that. That hardly seems like moral decline... compared to the fairly-recent-history of horrible death by untreatable disease, barbaric executions carried out as public entertainment, a few bouts of genocide, rampant lynchings(at the better of which, one could purchase commemerative photographs...) and so on and so forth.
Even if you consider assisted suicide morally equivallent to outright murder, the idea that western civilization is somehow inching its way up the murder-ometer is empirically nutty. The 20th century is a tough act to follow. If you don't hew to such a view, the idea that this is somehow a depraved occurrence becomes even harder to justify...
I'm somewhat inclined to wonder if this is just part of some terrifyingly value-rational spreadsheet junkie's byzantine plan to manipulate the market in refined-fictionalonium futures or something of the sort...
Ach, that makes it even worse. Started at 3rd and stole 2nd...