1. Obtain an outline map of the world, preferably black and white.
2. Select four colors. 1, 2, 3, and 4.
3. Fill all areas of the world that you expect to be nigh-unimaginably futuristic(routine occurrence of transhumans, strong AIs, kilometer high metamaterial structures, etc.) in 2061 with color 1.
4. Fill all areas of the world that you expect to be surprisingly mundane in 2061, except for a few of those wacky details that futurists never get right(everybody is still working in cubicles and flying aging 787s; but something as unexpected as facebook would have been in 1950 occupies 30% of the cube-dweller's time), with color 2.
5. Fill all areas of the world that will still be "developing" in 2061(the local elites will have access to everything from the color 2 zones, and color 1s, if present; but the bulk of the populace will still be mired in such classics as mud farming, Kalashnikovs, and nokias) with color 3.
6. Fill all areas of the world that will be radically dystopian and/or uninhabitable for cool reasons(radical climate shifts/flooding, nanite plague, biotech advances make new strains of smallpox and anthrax and friends as common as new malware is today, etc.) with color 4.
Which is why all reasonably competent motorists store a failover family in a second, redundant, car. It just isn't economic to pay for extra reliability in a single unit when you can get six lanes of virtually disposable vehicles for the same money and cluster them with commodity bitumen.
I'm also not saying that it is necessarily a bad, or desperate, move, just that (unlike discounting software, where what you are "losing" is almost certainly imaginary-they-most-likely-would-have-pirated-it-anyway money) heavy hardware discounts cost real money.
Presumably, they think that the money it costs will be worth it, and they may well be right; but it is a different flavor of tactic.
The difference, arguably, is that the unit cost of a piece of software closely approaches zero. The shiny disks and the box(if it isn't a campus setup, where they just email you the key and a download link) aren't quite free; but the overwhelming majority of any piece of software's price is the "what we can get for it" slice, not the "must recover marginal cost of production" slice.
Hardware, by contrast, has a substantial marginal cost of production. Lower than MSRP, obviously; but way higher than software.
This is supposed to be the future. It's cool that he can walk and all; but where is the iphone app that will allow me to control his legs over the internet?
I haven't owned any of them, so I don't know the specific behavior of any given console, I was just expressing the general position that no computing device sold for consumer use should be considered as other than defective if it can heat-damage itself under any conditions that a human would reasonably endure(the classic "all day in a locked car in the summer sun" or "stored at sub-freezing temperatures then taken inside and operated while condensation is forming inside" cases, for instance, would fall outside of that bound).
If you restrict their airflow, fill them with dust, or cram them against the wall right on top of your monstrous 70's tube amp, it is entirely reasonable for them not to run for very long; but being capable of graceful throttling or shutdown, ideally with an informative error response of some kind, is a perfectly reasonable baseline expectation.
I don't honestly follow the issue much, so I don't know whether, or how often, actual thermal brickings occur; but I'd count them as design defects rather than PEBKAC. On the other hand, somebody who restricts the airflow and then whines about how the device keeps displaying "Thermal shutdown, ensure that the device has proper ventilation." and shutting down is just a dumbass.
It could be that I'm just a geek whose concern for WAF is basically zero(and, indeed, it probably is); but I think that the fetish for thinness and apparently-seamles plastic shells in non-portable consumer electronics has really done more harm than good from a user-experience standpoint.
Just as a function of basic geometry(and the fact that it is hard to get the central motor portion of a fan below a certain size) smaller fans have to either move less air, be louder, or both. Then you get into the pitch issue. 40mm fans whine. High speed ones whine really loudly. 60mm units are only slightly less annoying. 80s have the decency to "hum", and 120s just sort of whirr. If you make your device really thin, you are pretty much forced to either use small, annoying, inefficient fans in the standard 'snapped in to rear grills' location, or use a larger fan in some sort of ducted horizontal/blower configuration that usually just serves to emphasize that the static pressure capabilities of standard DC ventilation fans are pretty lousy.
I'm hardly arguing that every desktop and console should be an overclocker tower studded with illuminated 160mm units(and in portables small, custom, ventilation systems are definitely a necessary evil); but today's consoles would be substantially quieter, and less vulnerable to overheating, if the designers weren't pathologically afraid of showing a few mesh inflow/outflow areas, and using cases that can accommodate an 80mm or two... Particularly after they've been given a year to start wearing out their bearings(or sleeves, gotta keep that BOM down...), those 60s just suck, and sound like mosquito root-canal doing it.
The huge lie, of course, is visible in the fact that cable-based legacy services and fiber-based "triple play" internet/quasi-cableTV/telephone being rolled out by the telcos generally split the available downsteam bandwidth between the real, user-visible, internet bandwidth used for the internet connection part of things, and the non-user-visible bandwidth dedicated to sending digital media streams down the wire that are sold as "cable" rather than "internet streaming".
For the traditional cable type stuff, at least, there is the argument to be made that, while it consumes massive downstream bandwidth, it imposes fairly limit load on the infrastructure one level up; because it is the same downstream feed for everybody in the service area. For pay-per-view, though, it is basically the same thing as an internet-based stream, except billed differently.
With bittorrent, at least, while most of the ISP whining was disengenuous bullshit aimed at rationalizing the results of profits going to shareholders rather than better infrastructure, it was technically true that upstream bandwidth available to legacy cable-based systems was fairly tightly constrained. With something like Netflix, though, it's just stinginess about upgrading the head ends, and just-plain-anticompetitive desire to slice the available downsteam bandwidth into two artificially distinct types, "internet" which is billed one way(and they really don't want to be used for video) and "Cable" which is billed a different way, doesn't offer arbitrary IP data services; but is bundled with video on which a fat profit margin is made.
Blaming the game in such cases is stupid; but blaming the hardware or firmware isn't.
A computer shouldn't be expected to operate at full performance under all conditions; but failure to throttle clocks on high power silicon or halt gracefully before suffering hardware damage is pretty shoddy work; doubly so in something like a console or laptop, where the manufacturer has full control of every component, thermal sensor, fan, and airflow path inside the chassis.
The idea that "Apple causes religious reaction in brains of fans" is absolute nonsense. Those pointy-headed intellectuals have it all wrong(probably because they are trying to do visualizations on an emachine or something).
The truth is, a number of dusty little abrahamic "deities" have hijacked the portions of the brain that evolved to appreciate Apple products in a fair number of unfortunate individuals. Hence the confusion.
I suspect that the larger security problem won't be stealing by cryptoanalytic means; but stealing by simple system intrusion means.
Experience seems to have fairly conclusively demonstrated that, on average, people not skilled in(and willing to dedicated substantial time to) the art are basically incapable of keeping their digital assets under their control. Either they run an architecturally open OS, and the hackers get them, or they live in a walled garden, and the gardener owns them... If I were trying to steal people's coins, I'd use the same social-egineering/trojan attacks that work more or less constantly to just compromise the user's box, not beat my head against some demonstrably intractable compute problem.
For reasons unclear to me, Java is rather a dog to load; which makes it largely uncompetitive with JS or flash for light web stuff(never mind JS's easy integration with page elements, or Flash's artist-friendly authoring tools); but the actual speed of the crunching that goes on inside the JVM is very competitive. I leave the question of just exactly how close something in a JVM is or isn't to a native compiled C thing to those who care more than I do; but Java is almost certainly the fastest easily-embedded-in-a-webpage crunching environment, even if it does seem to take the same 15 seconds to start up that it took in the late 90s...
Depends on the age of the box, and the nature of the hardware.
Older hardware, especially if it's sucking at the teat of a lousy PSU that only ever dreamed of 75% efficiency, has a comparatively low delta between idle draw and full power. Newer stuff, especially for laptops; but with most of the same techniques showing up in desktops, can achieve fairly dramatic differences between idle, or near idle, and full bore operation.
Since computers are basically just electric heaters, at a macro level, the rough heuristic is just to listen: If a computer sounds the same at idle and at load, it is either horribly over-cooled at idle, or sucks at power saving. If it whispers at idle, and screams like a legion of the damned at load, there has been a major change in heat output, and thus electricity usage.
Virtually any act of "creating" property, whether based on some parameters of the universe that guarantee scarcity(limited number of atom type x in the gravity well, crypto) or based on fiat. Fiat currencies have seigniorage, when rights to land, water, fish stocks, "intellectual property" are created for the first time, somebody inevitably wins out. In this case, the early adopter wonks who burned through the easy side of the pool of cryptographic problems are the winners.
I assume that(aside from the fact that many of the fanboys are also the winners, so nobody who cares about bitcoins cares about that) the theory is that, since the supply is finite, and many of the remaining ones increasingly expensive to discover, that the initial injustices in distribution will be glossed over fairly quickly, and the situation will become one where(aside from the occasional irrational actor who just enjoys building GPU computing rigs) all holders of bitcoins obtained them by transactions for stuff.
With all codified stores of value, you tend not to have to chase them back too far to find an arguably unjust origin. Banknotes are just printed and passed as legal tender, real estate tends to have a string of nice little title-deeds leading back to some sort of period of war, chaos, and/or plunder. We typically just ignore that and, with the passing of time, the situation (sometimes) works itself out such that all currently living holders of the given asset smell more or less clean. There have been various attempts at philosophical justification for the 'natural' creation of property; but they are largely irrelevant and tepid. We mostly just let enough time pass that the initial charade is forgotten and then get on with business.
Quite possibly too late to x86-ize the market, and capture the sort of margins that they have historically enjoyed; but being the man with the best fabs in town doesn't sound all bad when the rest of the town is guys cutting each other's throats over generic ARM SoCs fabbed on assorted unexciting processes...
Unfortunately, this is Jobs' secret plan to promote iDevices at the expensive of the horrible, relatively open, sometimes even expandable devices that the shareholders keep forcing him to sell. All the poor guy wants to do is create devices of timeless perfection, immune to user tampering and free of the slightest chink in their perfectly smooth shell.
He has been stockpiling vulnerabilities for years, waiting for the day when he could wait no more...
That's actually one of the big areas of research for that particular cancer now: the early stage stuff, at least, is pretty curable; but the methods are invasive and often result in incontinence or impotence. There is thus a good deal of interest in knowing which tumors are on track to kill you relatively horribly, relatively quickly, and need to be treated aggressively, and which ones are just going to sit there, with a scheduled breakout ~10+ years after you die of something else entirely.
You don't want otherwise reasonably healthy 65 year olds dying of metastatic cancer; but you also don't want to have somebody spend a decade dribbling urine in order to remove a tumor that wasn't even going to be noticable outside of a diagnostic setting until a few years after the pneumonia got them anyway...
Coffee contains a known psychoactive stimulant, one which many people find pleasant. This makes it a drug. Drugs are axiomatically evil(unless associated with rugged American individualism and/or cowboys). Therefore, coffee cannot possibly have any positive effects. Scientists! Get back to the lab and produce better results.
I eagerly await enlightenment as to how automatically assigning Nintendo a worldwide license to do whatever they want with pictures taken by a 3DS will battle piracy...
In virtually all relevant jurisdictions(ie. ones where people actually have money) copyright infringement is already illegal, often pretty harshly so, and in a nontrivial subset of those regions, cracking DRM schemes is as well, no clickwrap required. The "rights" that Nintendo is claiming in their EULA are either wildly irrelevant to piracy(except in the sense that grabbing copyrighted material produced by others on hardware they purchased from Nintendo is pretty damn piratical on Nintendo's part...) or not at all clearly legal(destroying somebody else's property because an "unauthorized peripheral" was connected to it) or an uneccessary duplication of existing, non-contractually-based law(copyright violation is illegal even if the clickwrap doesn't say so, DMCA-esque laws hold in a number of areas, again without the assistance of clickwrap).
This EULA is a mixture of invasive, redundant, and abusive, regardless of how much the evil pirates did or didn't cost them last round.
The extra problem, with modern electronic devices, is that the absurd terms can often be enforced automatically, which makes them hard for anybody without significant technical knowledge to avoid, and hard for anybody without significant legal backing to seek redress for after the fact.
The practice of printing crazy shit vaguely grounded in a wet dream of copyright law on packaging goes back at least as far as Edison cylinders. However, an Edison cylinder wasn't going to phone home to the mothership and automatically enforce the terms whenever it got within range of an internet connection. If you did something in breach of the shrinkwrap EULA, the burden was on them to find out and sue you. Now, many of the terms can be enforced automatically, and it is on you to demonstrate that you were wronged in some legally actionable way and that the clickwrap is unenforceable.
In this case, Nintendo appears to be claiming the right to hoover up, and use for any purpose, basically anything stored on the hardware, and to brick the hardware if they don't like its state. Both of these activities would be quite easy to do automatically. It may not be entirely true that "possession is nine tenths the law"; but starting from the position where the opposing party has already done unto you, and you have to fight to keep them from getting away with it is not a pleasant business...
I'm not sure what flavor of "balance" could make the language of Nintendo's ToS any less absurdly draconian.
Is a lot of it probably unenforceable? Yeah, possibly, if you've got a hundred grand and a year to drop on fighting it; but that will hardly be relevant to most users of the device, especially if its terms are(on devices not modified with sufficient cleverness) enforced technologically.
I suspect that there is a reason why Bezos sells stuff on the internet, rather than practicing constitutional law. If I've been following the case correctly, the states demanding action are states where Amazon has a business presence and a customer. They are simply making an intra-state demand that those doing business in the state collect sales taxes, per usual.
A state with no Amazon business would be on dubious interstate-commerce ice(though post Gonzales v. Raich virtually anything is arguably interstate commerce); but saying "businesses wishing to conduct business in this state must abide by state laws" is hardly a bold arrogation of interstate powers. Bezos is, shockingly enough, just protective of his ~5% advantage over the B&Ms...
It isn't actually clear that schools have all that great an incentive to be terribly protective of their "curriculum". Some colleges have explicitly endorsed(and funded) things like OpenCourseWare, and even for the ones that don't, it isn't as though you'd have a hard time scraping a complete syllabus and reading list off the prof's website(or, if the school uses some horrid authenticated 'portal' like that damnable "blackboard" crap, virtually anybody taking the course would give you a copy of the syllabus and reading list for a 6-pack...)
At the highschool level, things like "AP" and "IB" are pretty heavily codified, and the tests that actually verify your knowledge of them are administered independently of the school, so you don't run into the "You say that 'my mommy and daddy academy' was taught according to Roxbury Latin's curriculum. How cute... Now go away." problem. Public schools, similarly, have voluminous state standards and approved textbooks that are trivially available for public inspection.
What schools actually sell isn't really curriculum; but (depending on level and institution) a mixture of prestige/networking, a reputation that allows them to (credibly) assert that a graduate with a decent GPA has actually learned their curriculum, practicum courses using facilities unavailable to smaller institutions or individuals(particularly in things like chemistry and physics), and access to really good people in the relevant fields.
Access to a good curriculum can, certainly, make autodidactic behavior easier(given that the set of books/resources one could possibly devote time to is larger than could be tackled in a lifetime, it sure does help to have somebody else suggest the ones worth starting on, a problem for which some intelligence is required; but no level of brilliance will substitute for years of experience...) and one's experience with a merely OK teacher following a good curriculum will be much better than the same teacher following a bad one. However, it is really impressive to watch and experience what a Good teacher can do, with or without a curriculum. There are plenty of stuffed suits out there, and plenty of research-focused intellectuals barely cleared for human interaction; but there are also Good Teachers who can bring more insight into a series of extemporaneous talks and reading suggestions than could 90% of their lesser peers, given full access to a curriculum. Good schools try to have some of those on hand.
I applaud efforts to use technology's ability to organize and cheaply disseminate information that would historically have mouldered away somewhere to provide broader access to information, and advice on how to use it, to people who don't have a good source thereof. Hopefully it will even outcompete some pathologically counterproductive teaching environments. I'm somewhat skeptical, however, of such projects abilities to either rival having access to really good teaching, or to handle the task of introducing students to new things. Given how cheap technology makes it, a system that is purely helpful to autodidacts is still entirely worth it; but some of the pieces where the motivated autodidacts of the world stand around congratulating each other on how brilliant their newfound educational model is seem to miss the fact that much of the educational world's "trench work" consists of trying to inspire disinterested students to become interested learners(and, if that fails, at least shove enough basic knowledge into them that they don't become another recruit for the useless festering underclass...)
Slashdot Mirror
The game is called "The Cynic's 4 Color Puzzle".
1. Obtain an outline map of the world, preferably black and white.
2. Select four colors. 1, 2, 3, and 4.
3. Fill all areas of the world that you expect to be nigh-unimaginably futuristic(routine occurrence of transhumans, strong AIs, kilometer high metamaterial structures, etc.) in 2061 with color 1.
4. Fill all areas of the world that you expect to be surprisingly mundane in 2061, except for a few of those wacky details that futurists never get right(everybody is still working in cubicles and flying aging 787s; but something as unexpected as facebook would have been in 1950 occupies 30% of the cube-dweller's time), with color 2.
5. Fill all areas of the world that will still be "developing" in 2061(the local elites will have access to everything from the color 2 zones, and color 1s, if present; but the bulk of the populace will still be mired in such classics as mud farming, Kalashnikovs, and nokias) with color 3.
6. Fill all areas of the world that will be radically dystopian and/or uninhabitable for cool reasons(radical climate shifts/flooding, nanite plague, biotech advances make new strains of smallpox and anthrax and friends as common as new malware is today, etc.) with color 4.
7. Argue at length about one another's maps.
Which is why all reasonably competent motorists store a failover family in a second, redundant, car. It just isn't economic to pay for extra reliability in a single unit when you can get six lanes of virtually disposable vehicles for the same money and cluster them with commodity bitumen.
Send my love to spouse_02!
I'm also not saying that it is necessarily a bad, or desperate, move, just that (unlike discounting software, where what you are "losing" is almost certainly imaginary-they-most-likely-would-have-pirated-it-anyway money) heavy hardware discounts cost real money.
Presumably, they think that the money it costs will be worth it, and they may well be right; but it is a different flavor of tactic.
The difference, arguably, is that the unit cost of a piece of software closely approaches zero. The shiny disks and the box(if it isn't a campus setup, where they just email you the key and a download link) aren't quite free; but the overwhelming majority of any piece of software's price is the "what we can get for it" slice, not the "must recover marginal cost of production" slice.
Hardware, by contrast, has a substantial marginal cost of production. Lower than MSRP, obviously; but way higher than software.
This is supposed to be the future. It's cool that he can walk and all; but where is the iphone app that will allow me to control his legs over the internet?
I haven't owned any of them, so I don't know the specific behavior of any given console, I was just expressing the general position that no computing device sold for consumer use should be considered as other than defective if it can heat-damage itself under any conditions that a human would reasonably endure(the classic "all day in a locked car in the summer sun" or "stored at sub-freezing temperatures then taken inside and operated while condensation is forming inside" cases, for instance, would fall outside of that bound).
If you restrict their airflow, fill them with dust, or cram them against the wall right on top of your monstrous 70's tube amp, it is entirely reasonable for them not to run for very long; but being capable of graceful throttling or shutdown, ideally with an informative error response of some kind, is a perfectly reasonable baseline expectation.
I don't honestly follow the issue much, so I don't know whether, or how often, actual thermal brickings occur; but I'd count them as design defects rather than PEBKAC. On the other hand, somebody who restricts the airflow and then whines about how the device keeps displaying "Thermal shutdown, ensure that the device has proper ventilation." and shutting down is just a dumbass.
It could be that I'm just a geek whose concern for WAF is basically zero(and, indeed, it probably is); but I think that the fetish for thinness and apparently-seamles plastic shells in non-portable consumer electronics has really done more harm than good from a user-experience standpoint.
Just as a function of basic geometry(and the fact that it is hard to get the central motor portion of a fan below a certain size) smaller fans have to either move less air, be louder, or both. Then you get into the pitch issue. 40mm fans whine. High speed ones whine really loudly. 60mm units are only slightly less annoying. 80s have the decency to "hum", and 120s just sort of whirr. If you make your device really thin, you are pretty much forced to either use small, annoying, inefficient fans in the standard 'snapped in to rear grills' location, or use a larger fan in some sort of ducted horizontal/blower configuration that usually just serves to emphasize that the static pressure capabilities of standard DC ventilation fans are pretty lousy.
I'm hardly arguing that every desktop and console should be an overclocker tower studded with illuminated 160mm units(and in portables small, custom, ventilation systems are definitely a necessary evil); but today's consoles would be substantially quieter, and less vulnerable to overheating, if the designers weren't pathologically afraid of showing a few mesh inflow/outflow areas, and using cases that can accommodate an 80mm or two... Particularly after they've been given a year to start wearing out their bearings(or sleeves, gotta keep that BOM down...), those 60s just suck, and sound like mosquito root-canal doing it.
The huge lie, of course, is visible in the fact that cable-based legacy services and fiber-based "triple play" internet/quasi-cableTV/telephone being rolled out by the telcos generally split the available downsteam bandwidth between the real, user-visible, internet bandwidth used for the internet connection part of things, and the non-user-visible bandwidth dedicated to sending digital media streams down the wire that are sold as "cable" rather than "internet streaming".
For the traditional cable type stuff, at least, there is the argument to be made that, while it consumes massive downstream bandwidth, it imposes fairly limit load on the infrastructure one level up; because it is the same downstream feed for everybody in the service area. For pay-per-view, though, it is basically the same thing as an internet-based stream, except billed differently.
With bittorrent, at least, while most of the ISP whining was disengenuous bullshit aimed at rationalizing the results of profits going to shareholders rather than better infrastructure, it was technically true that upstream bandwidth available to legacy cable-based systems was fairly tightly constrained. With something like Netflix, though, it's just stinginess about upgrading the head ends, and just-plain-anticompetitive desire to slice the available downsteam bandwidth into two artificially distinct types, "internet" which is billed one way(and they really don't want to be used for video) and "Cable" which is billed a different way, doesn't offer arbitrary IP data services; but is bundled with video on which a fat profit margin is made.
Set them all on fire.
Blaming the game in such cases is stupid; but blaming the hardware or firmware isn't.
A computer shouldn't be expected to operate at full performance under all conditions; but failure to throttle clocks on high power silicon or halt gracefully before suffering hardware damage is pretty shoddy work; doubly so in something like a console or laptop, where the manufacturer has full control of every component, thermal sensor, fan, and airflow path inside the chassis.
The idea that "Apple causes religious reaction in brains of fans" is absolute nonsense. Those pointy-headed intellectuals have it all wrong(probably because they are trying to do visualizations on an emachine or something).
The truth is, a number of dusty little abrahamic "deities" have hijacked the portions of the brain that evolved to appreciate Apple products in a fair number of unfortunate individuals. Hence the confusion.
I suspect that the larger security problem won't be stealing by cryptoanalytic means; but stealing by simple system intrusion means.
Experience seems to have fairly conclusively demonstrated that, on average, people not skilled in(and willing to dedicated substantial time to) the art are basically incapable of keeping their digital assets under their control. Either they run an architecturally open OS, and the hackers get them, or they live in a walled garden, and the gardener owns them... If I were trying to steal people's coins, I'd use the same social-egineering/trojan attacks that work more or less constantly to just compromise the user's box, not beat my head against some demonstrably intractable compute problem.
For reasons unclear to me, Java is rather a dog to load; which makes it largely uncompetitive with JS or flash for light web stuff(never mind JS's easy integration with page elements, or Flash's artist-friendly authoring tools); but the actual speed of the crunching that goes on inside the JVM is very competitive. I leave the question of just exactly how close something in a JVM is or isn't to a native compiled C thing to those who care more than I do; but Java is almost certainly the fastest easily-embedded-in-a-webpage crunching environment, even if it does seem to take the same 15 seconds to start up that it took in the late 90s...
Depends on the age of the box, and the nature of the hardware.
Older hardware, especially if it's sucking at the teat of a lousy PSU that only ever dreamed of 75% efficiency, has a comparatively low delta between idle draw and full power. Newer stuff, especially for laptops; but with most of the same techniques showing up in desktops, can achieve fairly dramatic differences between idle, or near idle, and full bore operation.
Since computers are basically just electric heaters, at a macro level, the rough heuristic is just to listen: If a computer sounds the same at idle and at load, it is either horribly over-cooled at idle, or sucks at power saving. If it whispers at idle, and screams like a legion of the damned at load, there has been a major change in heat output, and thus electricity usage.
Virtually any act of "creating" property, whether based on some parameters of the universe that guarantee scarcity(limited number of atom type x in the gravity well, crypto) or based on fiat. Fiat currencies have seigniorage, when rights to land, water, fish stocks, "intellectual property" are created for the first time, somebody inevitably wins out. In this case, the early adopter wonks who burned through the easy side of the pool of cryptographic problems are the winners.
I assume that(aside from the fact that many of the fanboys are also the winners, so nobody who cares about bitcoins cares about that) the theory is that, since the supply is finite, and many of the remaining ones increasingly expensive to discover, that the initial injustices in distribution will be glossed over fairly quickly, and the situation will become one where(aside from the occasional irrational actor who just enjoys building GPU computing rigs) all holders of bitcoins obtained them by transactions for stuff.
With all codified stores of value, you tend not to have to chase them back too far to find an arguably unjust origin. Banknotes are just printed and passed as legal tender, real estate tends to have a string of nice little title-deeds leading back to some sort of period of war, chaos, and/or plunder. We typically just ignore that and, with the passing of time, the situation (sometimes) works itself out such that all currently living holders of the given asset smell more or less clean. There have been various attempts at philosophical justification for the 'natural' creation of property; but they are largely irrelevant and tepid. We mostly just let enough time pass that the initial charade is forgotten and then get on with business.
Quite possibly too late to x86-ize the market, and capture the sort of margins that they have historically enjoyed; but being the man with the best fabs in town doesn't sound all bad when the rest of the town is guys cutting each other's throats over generic ARM SoCs fabbed on assorted unexciting processes...
Unfortunately, this is Jobs' secret plan to promote iDevices at the expensive of the horrible, relatively open, sometimes even expandable devices that the shareholders keep forcing him to sell. All the poor guy wants to do is create devices of timeless perfection, immune to user tampering and free of the slightest chink in their perfectly smooth shell.
He has been stockpiling vulnerabilities for years, waiting for the day when he could wait no more...
Somebody is running an FTP server on a computer that has a screen? Also, the obligatory "SFTP Motherfucker! Why don't you use it?"
That's actually one of the big areas of research for that particular cancer now: the early stage stuff, at least, is pretty curable; but the methods are invasive and often result in incontinence or impotence. There is thus a good deal of interest in knowing which tumors are on track to kill you relatively horribly, relatively quickly, and need to be treated aggressively, and which ones are just going to sit there, with a scheduled breakout ~10+ years after you die of something else entirely.
You don't want otherwise reasonably healthy 65 year olds dying of metastatic cancer; but you also don't want to have somebody spend a decade dribbling urine in order to remove a tumor that wasn't even going to be noticable outside of a diagnostic setting until a few years after the pneumonia got them anyway...
Coffee contains a known psychoactive stimulant, one which many people find pleasant. This makes it a drug. Drugs are axiomatically evil(unless associated with rugged American individualism and/or cowboys). Therefore, coffee cannot possibly have any positive effects. Scientists! Get back to the lab and produce better results.
I eagerly await enlightenment as to how automatically assigning Nintendo a worldwide license to do whatever they want with pictures taken by a 3DS will battle piracy...
In virtually all relevant jurisdictions(ie. ones where people actually have money) copyright infringement is already illegal, often pretty harshly so, and in a nontrivial subset of those regions, cracking DRM schemes is as well, no clickwrap required. The "rights" that Nintendo is claiming in their EULA are either wildly irrelevant to piracy(except in the sense that grabbing copyrighted material produced by others on hardware they purchased from Nintendo is pretty damn piratical on Nintendo's part...) or not at all clearly legal(destroying somebody else's property because an "unauthorized peripheral" was connected to it) or an uneccessary duplication of existing, non-contractually-based law(copyright violation is illegal even if the clickwrap doesn't say so, DMCA-esque laws hold in a number of areas, again without the assistance of clickwrap).
This EULA is a mixture of invasive, redundant, and abusive, regardless of how much the evil pirates did or didn't cost them last round.
The extra problem, with modern electronic devices, is that the absurd terms can often be enforced automatically, which makes them hard for anybody without significant technical knowledge to avoid, and hard for anybody without significant legal backing to seek redress for after the fact.
The practice of printing crazy shit vaguely grounded in a wet dream of copyright law on packaging goes back at least as far as Edison cylinders. However, an Edison cylinder wasn't going to phone home to the mothership and automatically enforce the terms whenever it got within range of an internet connection. If you did something in breach of the shrinkwrap EULA, the burden was on them to find out and sue you. Now, many of the terms can be enforced automatically, and it is on you to demonstrate that you were wronged in some legally actionable way and that the clickwrap is unenforceable.
In this case, Nintendo appears to be claiming the right to hoover up, and use for any purpose, basically anything stored on the hardware, and to brick the hardware if they don't like its state. Both of these activities would be quite easy to do automatically. It may not be entirely true that "possession is nine tenths the law"; but starting from the position where the opposing party has already done unto you, and you have to fight to keep them from getting away with it is not a pleasant business...
I'm not sure what flavor of "balance" could make the language of Nintendo's ToS any less absurdly draconian.
Is a lot of it probably unenforceable? Yeah, possibly, if you've got a hundred grand and a year to drop on fighting it; but that will hardly be relevant to most users of the device, especially if its terms are(on devices not modified with sufficient cleverness) enforced technologically.
I suspect that there is a reason why Bezos sells stuff on the internet, rather than practicing constitutional law. If I've been following the case correctly, the states demanding action are states where Amazon has a business presence and a customer. They are simply making an intra-state demand that those doing business in the state collect sales taxes, per usual.
A state with no Amazon business would be on dubious interstate-commerce ice(though post Gonzales v. Raich virtually anything is arguably interstate commerce); but saying "businesses wishing to conduct business in this state must abide by state laws" is hardly a bold arrogation of interstate powers. Bezos is, shockingly enough, just protective of his ~5% advantage over the B&Ms...
I'm failing to see the tyranny inherent in private schools deciding to publish some information on the web, for the interested to peruse if they care.
It isn't actually clear that schools have all that great an incentive to be terribly protective of their "curriculum". Some colleges have explicitly endorsed(and funded) things like OpenCourseWare, and even for the ones that don't, it isn't as though you'd have a hard time scraping a complete syllabus and reading list off the prof's website(or, if the school uses some horrid authenticated 'portal' like that damnable "blackboard" crap, virtually anybody taking the course would give you a copy of the syllabus and reading list for a 6-pack...)
At the highschool level, things like "AP" and "IB" are pretty heavily codified, and the tests that actually verify your knowledge of them are administered independently of the school, so you don't run into the "You say that 'my mommy and daddy academy' was taught according to Roxbury Latin's curriculum. How cute... Now go away." problem. Public schools, similarly, have voluminous state standards and approved textbooks that are trivially available for public inspection.
What schools actually sell isn't really curriculum; but (depending on level and institution) a mixture of prestige/networking, a reputation that allows them to (credibly) assert that a graduate with a decent GPA has actually learned their curriculum, practicum courses using facilities unavailable to smaller institutions or individuals(particularly in things like chemistry and physics), and access to really good people in the relevant fields.
Access to a good curriculum can, certainly, make autodidactic behavior easier(given that the set of books/resources one could possibly devote time to is larger than could be tackled in a lifetime, it sure does help to have somebody else suggest the ones worth starting on, a problem for which some intelligence is required; but no level of brilliance will substitute for years of experience...) and one's experience with a merely OK teacher following a good curriculum will be much better than the same teacher following a bad one. However, it is really impressive to watch and experience what a Good teacher can do, with or without a curriculum. There are plenty of stuffed suits out there, and plenty of research-focused intellectuals barely cleared for human interaction; but there are also Good Teachers who can bring more insight into a series of extemporaneous talks and reading suggestions than could 90% of their lesser peers, given full access to a curriculum. Good schools try to have some of those on hand.
I applaud efforts to use technology's ability to organize and cheaply disseminate information that would historically have mouldered away somewhere to provide broader access to information, and advice on how to use it, to people who don't have a good source thereof. Hopefully it will even outcompete some pathologically counterproductive teaching environments. I'm somewhat skeptical, however, of such projects abilities to either rival having access to really good teaching, or to handle the task of introducing students to new things. Given how cheap technology makes it, a system that is purely helpful to autodidacts is still entirely worth it; but some of the pieces where the motivated autodidacts of the world stand around congratulating each other on how brilliant their newfound educational model is seem to miss the fact that much of the educational world's "trench work" consists of trying to inspire disinterested students to become interested learners(and, if that fails, at least shove enough basic knowledge into them that they don't become another recruit for the useless festering underclass...)