I loaded the newegg homepage a few minutes ago and(by pure happenstance) they were offering a 35x optical zoom Canon point-and-shoot for a hair under $400. I'm guessing that a real lens snob who can afford something that gets its own tripod and looks like an anti-tank weapon would be driven to tears by the optical artefacts(particularly around the edge of the frame); but with a tiny tripod and some adequate image stabilization wizardry(yours standard on the nicer point-and-shoots) I suspect that you can get pretty adequate results from something that neither is, nor even looks like, a DSLR...
You'd better include a major slice of American rentacops and nebulous security agencies, along with a fair percentage of the citizens they so zealously 'protect'; along with Kuwait...
It sounds like classic security theatre to me. It has, somehow, become an article of faith in jackboot circles(the world over, apparently; our Limey friends on Airstrip One seem to be the most enthusiastic; but the notion is international in its appeal) that 'terrorists' simply cannot function without extremely high quality photographs, taken personally with professional grade equipment, even if their target is some tourist trap with 10+ million publicly available images on the web... It has further, somehow, become an article of faith(among both jackboots and photo-n00bs) that DLSRs are the magic ticket to being the next Ansel Adams, while anything without interchangeable lenses might as well be a webcam from 1993.
How exactly these beliefs persist, I'm not quite sure, when any moron who spends ten minutes in the camera aisle at Best Buy can see that contemporary happy-snapper gear is pretty competent(particularly when paired with contemporary flash memory that will give said happy-snapper 10,000 chances to get it right for under $40...) and trivially available stuff like Photosynth demonstrates the power of huge numbers of shoddy images combined with some algorithmic cleverness...
Wasn't this exact method(COTS audio recorder + playback attack) used in Wargames? Circa 1983?
If anything, the only surprise here is that criminals were ever not taking advantage of cheap MP3 player/recorder hardware. The economies of scale with your basic anonymous fleabay-special "designers MP5 player" are stupendous, and most of the (comparatively) difficult stuff is in software, which is an easier trail to hide...
The situation is arguably a little more nuanced than that...
You can get long term support in closed ecosystems, even very closed ones(just ask the nice chap from IBM Mainframe sales...); but it'll cost you. Often a great deal and you had better be sure that the vendor is contractually on board; because they can, otherwise, pull the rug out from under you at their option(If they stop selling product X licenses/support contracts, you pretty much have to stop using product X. Game over. Copyright law. Have a nice day.).
OSS, by contrast, allocates support largely by popularity, with the option of using money to modify that allocation. If Project Y is popular, you might end up getting years of long term support for free. If it isn't, nobody can force you to drop it; but it might not be cheap to stick with it, if you need to make changes to keep using it(whether or not this is an issue varies widely: if you just need some internal OSS stack to boot in a VM, you can probably do that until the sun engulfs the inner planets for basically nothing. If you want someone to make Linux 2.2 run on your company's fleet of laptops so some creaky monstrosity can continue to be used, it'll take real money to silence the laughter of the needed kernel developers...)
Arguably, it might actually be getting less likely that Nvidia will ever provide decent OSS support...
Intel has all-but-formally-announced their intention to lock Nvidia out of everything they can, as fast as the feds will let them. On die-video, no QPI licence, trimming PCIe lanes off lower end products, etc. AMD has not been as frankly rude about it; but their on-die video will be even more competent than Intel's, and they control a smaller slice of the market, in any case. Pretty much across the board, Nvidia can reasonably expect to be shoved out of anything too small, power-constrained, thermal-constrained, or cost-constrained to have either a full discrete GPU(in laptops) or a full PCIe expansion slot, populated,(desktops/servers).
Unless they can think of some fairly clever pushback, and fast, this will leave them with a market of A)Enthusiast gamers(who tend to run Windows and replace GPUs frequently) B)Serious CAD/Visualization guys(who may or may not run Windows; but whose Very Expensive software packages depend on Nvidia's 'makes the train run on time' approach to OpenGL support, rather than software freedom, seemless OSX integration, or still working in 5 years) and C) GPU compute types (who, again, are running very expensive software on very expensive hardware, and care that it works and, if they are large enough, that they can get engineering support). None of these markets place a premium on FOSS drivers, and most of them make driver quality and featurefulness a major part of Nvidia's competitive advantage(going from 'foremost provider of GPU computing solutions' to 'just another fabless silicon vendor whose stuff will work if you target Gallium3D' would be bad news for Nvidia...).
AMD and Intel, on the other hand, while deadly rivals, are in virtually identical positions RE: FOSS drivers: For their low-end stuff, drivers are just a pain in the ass. Especially for Intel, if team Linux will overlook their suckitude because their ttys come back after suspend, or whatever it happens to be, that is a pure win. They are both racing to make low to midrange GPU capabilities just part of the CPU, and it is very much to their advantage if all their CPU capabilities are Just Supported on whatever OSes the market cares about. I would expect to see increasing divergence in strategy between Intel/AMD on the one hand and Nvidia on the other.
AD's set of default group policy templates only makes it trivial for IE; but you can also impose login, logoff, startup, shutdown, and a bunch of other locations for running arbitrary scripts/programs.
Most browsers, and any other programs that have SSL-related business, either store their set of trusted certs/authorities as a set of certificate files in some reasonably easily discoverable directory or piggyback IE's settings. If the former, you just execute a trivial file-copy script via group policy any time before the user has a chance to see the scary message. If the latter, you just use the IE method.
The problem isn't the 'reasonableness' of the penalty; but the dubiousness of the process. A private party pulling a standard of evidence and a due process of proof out of their ass and then sending monetary demands to those they deem guilty is vigilantism at best and shades pretty quickly into extortion. The size of the amount being extorted isn't the issue, the extortion is....
I must object to the use of the term "fine". A "fine" is a monetary penalty imposed under color of law as punishment, or part of a punishment, for a violation of the code of laws, demonstrated in a court of law according to due process.
Calling a private party's essentially extortionate demand to pay up or face (ruinously expensive even if innocent) legal action a "fine" is acccording it far too much legitimacy.
Sure, as a matter of probability, not all the threat letters will miss their mark, and some percentage will in fact be sent to people who downloaded and/or uploaded the game in violation of applicable law in their jurisdiction; but even those cases will hew to no established standards of evidence or due process. Given the known sloppiness(and clear perverse incentives involved) of these sorts of things a fair few won't even be accidentally correct, they'll simply be pure extortion without even coincidental overlap with justice.
No matter how much you hate copyright infringement, conflating vigilante 'justice' with process of law is dangerously sloppy. I don't know whether the CD Projekt spokesweasel is simply internally sloppy, or engaged in deliberate spin; but it is unacceptable.
That question really seems to depend on your budget and your motherboard...
If you are in the really cheap seats, you should probably spend whatever audio money you have on speakers or headphones that don't utterly suck. OK speakers/headphone drivers are still much trickier than OK silicon amps and DACs. On the other hand, a lot of today's fancy motherboards are happy to output S/PDIF in your choice of optical or electrical, which lets the DACs and amplification in your receiver, which can be of virtually arbitrary niceness, do the job. I'm sure there is some way that realtek can manage to fuck up dumping a pure digital bitstream across a purely digital bus; but it'll take some doing.
Only in the middle, where you have speakers/headphones nice enough to hear subtle imperfections(or just cranked so loud that you are getting repeatedly trampled into the noise floor) and the budget left over for a nice discrete card does it really make any sense. That and, of course, application specific stuff like audio recording, since motherboards don't exactly come with a bevy of XLR jacks...
The days when all that software positional audio dragged your overclocked celeron 333 down and wrecked your FPS framerates just aren't really with us anymore...
Something like a car, in a natural environment(not some empty closed test-track stuff), will suffer an accident from time to time. Human error, mechanical issues, sensor faults, algorithmic fuckups, whatever.
With a human driver(who basically all juries trivially recognize as an autonomous agent, since they think of all reasonably functional humans as such), the liability for accidents typically falls on one of the operators, unless a mechanical fault, braking issue, or something of that sort can be proven.
With an autonomous control computer, a jury will be much more likely to see the "driver" as an extension of the company who built the car, just like the brakes or the steering column, and assign liability accordingly.
Even if, lets say, computer-controlled cars delivered a 10-fold reduction in morbidity and mortality(which would save something like 35,000 Americans a year from death, plus an unknown but even larger number from serious injury, just to put things in perspective), that would likely be a net increase in liability for the vehicle manufacturers.
Until autonomous vehicles prove superior safety and insurers and/or legislators recognize the new state of affairs, it'll be strictly test tracks, tech demos, and internal use....
I'd be inclined to guess that the easier(and for many purposes more important) area of computer supremacy won't be in absolute speed(outside of carefully-controlled-for-robotic advantage environments like pick-and-place machines and closed rail tracks); but in sheer endurance.
Assuming that you don't totally cheap out on the fault tolerance or get horribly unlucky, the autonomous car should be able to complete the course every 27 minutes, with occasional pauses for refueling, and longer; but even more occasional pauses for hardware service on the car, virtually forever. That expert human driver, though, will do 17 minutes a number of times; but will be a downright danger to himself and others within 24 hours or so.
For many applications(municipal bus service and low-priority-low-cost mail delivery and commodity trucking/train deliver come to mind), it is virtually irrelevant what a top-notch human in fresh condition can do. What matters is either how many of those you can afford as spares, or what an exhausted, bored, hopped-up-on-stimulants-just-to-stay-awake human can do. Computers, on the other hand, may take longer than one would expect to catch up with best of breed humans in anything resembling natural conditions; but will be able to catch up with real world, performance-degraded humans considerably faster...
I'm guessing that the "gated communities for the affluent" comment is going to come back to bite him.
For one, American political discourse tends to shy away from anything that can even be remotely described as "class warfare". His comment doesn't really qualify; but once boiled into a contextless soundbite and replayed a few bazillion times on the news channels of the same cable companies on whose toes he is stepping, it sure will sound like it.
Second, it seems most likely that the rent-seeking model of tiered internet providers will be much closer to that of cable TV or old-school telco providers: that is, massive rent seeking; but much broader availability than "gated community" would imply. Everyone pays too much for cable, and everyone used to pay too much for long distance; but the companies realized that gouging everyone a bit was much more profitable than gouging half of the top quintile a lot. It may well end up being the case that only the affluent(and specifically the techy affluent) will be able to afford access to the real internet, as opposed to the "facebook and youtube over IP channel"; but that is too subtle a point to play in soundbites.
Third, and perhaps most serious, Telcos and Cable companies are actually superbly positioned to make a (dishonest; but superficially convincing) "friend of the common man" play. They are, in fact, bloated rent-seeking conglomerates; but, by the simple necessities of operating an infrastructure business, bloated rent-seeking conglomerates with very, very broad-based operations.
Most of the rents go right up the food chain to the big fish; but Verizon, Comcast, et al. have to have installers and linesmen, and technicians and whatnot in virtually every city and town. These guys aren't seeing much of those rents being collected, and are themselves paying too much for cable; but they know who their employers are. Also, since the marginal cost of adding an extra internet subscriber is nearly zero, doling out cheap/free internet access to schools, community centers, youth-centers-to-keep-at-risk-kids-off-the-street-after-school, etc. is very easy, very cheap, and good PR. All that adds up to a massive PR bonus in a broad based group of community groups, blue collar, semi-skilled and skilled tradesmen, and the like.(Obviously, it isn't as though a neutral internet wouldn't need linesmen, and a competitive internet would provide cheaper internet not as part of a cynical charity effort; but that isn't immediately visible...) This, along with a few modest, but strategic, monetary donations to the correct local charities, can be converted into a torrent of letters of support from various worthy local anti-poverty groups.
By contrast, tech companies tend to have fairly geographically narrow(or, even if geographically distributed, as with Google, Akamai, and friends, pretty lightly staffed, mostly with engineers and programmers and such) operations and human resources bases. Their customer bases are fairly broad, and they are often much more popular than the local Telcos and Cable outfits(only paranoid privacy geeks hate Google, while cable companies are about as popular as the IRS); but they have much less of the sort of presence that can translate into thousands of letters from the "grassroots". The tech guys do benefit a great many people; but most of them in smaller, subtler ways. Outside of areas that are virtually company towns, or highly-educated startup hotbeds, there is virtually no blue-ish collar bread-and-butter coming out of the tech industry(particularly since, for anything that can be shipped, hardware assembly is largely offshore). Internet competition and tech company services are likely to save everyone some dollars a month, in addition to the free speech and innovation benefits; but that isn't nearly as concrete as having a layer of people, coast to coast, whose checks you sign...
What I always wonder about with these waste-to-energy-it's-like-incineration-but-not-that-bad-kind-you-remember schemes is what happens with waste that is nasty on the level of the elements it contains, rather than just chemically.
If you burn something hard enough(not always something you can expect a real-world plant to do, with out considerable care; but we'll be charitable) virtually anything that is nasty because of its chemical structure is no longer your problem. That's why they incinerate chemical weapons, after all. With things like lead, cadmium, mercury, chlorine, etc. though, that are just tactless at the atomic level, about all you can do is produce aerosols, oxides, or both. Those then rain down merrily on the surrounding environment and proceed to do their thing.
Unfortunately, especially with modern plastics-and-electronics waste, which is very hard to separate economically from the rest of the stuff, such elements are all over the place. Your average widget from two christmasses ago probably contains a decent amount of chlorine, in the form of PVC insulation and the like, possibly some NiCads, bromated flame retardants, maybe some pre-ROHS leaded board or components, and possibly some plastic dyes that you don't really want to be burning(for instance, most of the world's cadmium that doesn't go into batteries goes either into optoelectronics or lightfast dyes for plastics. Lovely yellows and reds can be achieved)...
If there were some giant stream of nice, clean FDA-approved-for-food-contact polystyrene or something, burning it would produce pretty much nothing but the co2 and water, possibly a bit of carbon black, that you'd expect from looking at a basic chem textbook. With real world waste streams, though, there is so much ancillary crap in there that bad results are positively to be expected. It might still be better than coal, or better than incomplete combustion in a 19th century tech incinerator or Bubba's burn pit; but it isn't going to be pretty.
I get the impression that, even in nearly open-and-shut cases, contingency-fee lawyers have a quite logical disinterest in relatively poor defendants.
Since the contingency-fee guys aren't merely paid only if they win, they are paid only out of the winnings, their effective hourly rate is going to suck unless the defendant is relatively wealthy and relatively guilty(or extremely quick to knock over, as in these mass-mail extortion cases, which are probably incredibly cheap per-"case" to process, though, of course, setting up a mass-extortion operation could and has been, done with conventional fee and flat fee lawyers as well).
It is the case that the procedural costs and delays of justice are just too high, so all solutions will be imperfect; but the idea that contingency fee lawyers are a menace to relatively poor defendants, outside of reasonably rare cases, just seems economically implausible.
I don't think that blaming contingency-basis laywers as a general institution is all that accurate(and their lack can be positively harmful).
Because contingency-basis lawyers have to win cases in order to get paid, they arguably have to hew to a more selective standard than do standard per-hour lawyers. If I'm getting my hourly rate, I'll pretty much do whatever legal faffing you want, as long as it won't get me disbarred or otherwise open me to trouble that isn't worth it. If I get absolutely nothing until I win, I'm going to give the winnability(note, this is not identical with merit) of your case a very good look....
Now, the fact that winnability and merit are not identical, either because(as in this case) they are simply engaging in extortion outside the courtroom, or because(as in some malpractice cases) juries are simple emotional saps is a problem, and contingency-basis lawyers will(as a body that acts roughly value-rationally on average) be willing to take winnable cases whether or not they are justly winnable; but so will standard-fee lawyers(who will also be willing to take unwinnable cases, just or unjust, or harassment cases).
Plus, contingency-basis laywers are, in many cases, the only thing preventing access to justice(particularly civil justice) from being even more ludicrously lopsided than it already is. Criminal defendants have a right to an(often mediocre, horribly overworked) laywer, shockingly "law and order" plays better than "pay more public defenders"... People who have been wronged civilly have to get their own. Since lawyers aren't cheap, this pretty much means that civil justice for anybody who isn't at least upper-middle-class(or sticking strictly to small claims court) is available through a contingency-fee lawyer or not at all. Given the frequency with which civil wrongs are committed down the economic totem pole, "not at all" seems like a pretty lousy option...
The fact that it is possible to win unjust cases, and sometimes simply extort people, is a problem that needs to be addressed. The fact that there are lawyers who are willing to share their client's fate is, if anything, more conducive to justice than the alternative. Contingency-fee lawyers may be like cops who get a cut of the fine(if we consider fines that have to be demonstrated in court, not that "asset forfeiture" crap); in that they will swarm like flies over anything winnable in court; but hourly laywers are like mercenaries, in that they will do the bidding of whoever is paying them, without regard for winnability, much less justice, excepting only actions likely to make them liable to more punishment than is worth it.
If I were going to forbid a type of lawyer-payment arrangement, I'd actually say that justice would be better served by forbidding non-contingency lawyers(except in criminal cases, since a great many of those involve no money, only jail time, changing hands). A contingency-lawyer has to do the best job he can, on the best cases he can, or starve. A fee-based lawyer has to do the best job he can, on whatever his client is paying him to do, or starve. One will necessarily hew to winnability(whose relationship to justice is something that can be controlled by public policy), while the other will be a freelance heavy in the service of his client's economic interests...
I'm assuming that this is some legal analog of that trope from just about every special operations/spy themed violence drama ever made: "We are sending you to do something dangerous and illegal and highly advantageous to us. If it goes well, congratulations all around and we weren't involved. If it goes poorly, we've never heard of you before, and if we had than you must have gone rogue and been acting without authorization and we have nothing to do with it..."
Who is "they"? Any recent Linux kernel should be able to support a device such as that shown in the video with a userspace libUSB driver, no modification required. X might take some poking to get it to accept the existence of 10 cursors; but that is a totally distinct project. Then, of course, you have the zillions of programs that are going to need to do something useful with those exotic inputs...(and reasonable availability of that hardware device, and some place to put it along with your keyboard).
It is arguably a weakness of Linux; but there isn't really any "they" to do that. Anybody could; but there isn't really anybody in a position to.
They aren't compiling the kernel to see how long it will take(which, as you say, is rarely of all that much interest, few people do it and a fast build-box isn't going to break the budget of a serious project), they are using a multithreaded kernel compilation as an easy way to generate lots of non-interactive system load to see how much that degrades the performance, actual and perceived, of the various interactive tasks of interest to the desktop user.
This isn't about improving performance of any one specific program; but about making a reasonably heavily-loaded system much more pleasant to use. Compiling the kernel is just a trivial way to generate a large amount of non-interactive CPU load and a bit of disk thrashing...
Some poor saps persist in believing otherwise(hence the usual 1-required-ethics-course-per-MBA-course-of-study...); but the study of ethical philosophy and behaving ethically really don't have much to do with one another.
There are, arguably, a few cases that are genuine conundrums, where "ethical common sense" doesn't tell you anything, and you have to call in the professionals; but the vast majority of the time the person in the situation isn't acting ethically because they know ethics, or unethically because they don't, they just either care or don't(sorry Plato).
In fact, it might actually be easier to study ethics, as a matter of philosophy, if you are an amoral sociopath yourself. For normal people, so many ethical conclusions are simply blindingly commonsensical. It takes an active effort of will to ignore that and focus on why 'ethical' is what it is. For an amoral sociopath, treating 'ethical' as a dispassionate exercise in descriptive taxonomy and constructing theoretical patterns and structures that govern it is much simpler, no emotionally salient ethical instincts to get in the way.
An analogous situation might be an atheist studying theology. An atheist doesn't believe in god, so their study of theology would have no operational relevance; but they will be fully capable of doing textual analysis of whatever 'sacred' text you plunk in front of them, in exactly the way an English major could analyze the character of 'Tom Sawyer' from the text, without believing in his existence.
1. Humanities and soft sciences, in my experience, tend to be taught in courses whose grading depends much more on take-home essays than in class exams. Unless you have a smartphone with a nice camera, and a very on-the-ball internet cheating service, you can't really cheat in class over the internet; but doing so on a take home is absolutely trivial. Math and hard sciences often have take-home problem sets, some even worth a few points; but those are mostly just drill/practice for the exams that will curb-stomp you if you haven't done the work outside of class.
2. I'm sure that internet cheating is a large enough business to support specialization of labor. The writer of TFA clearly specializes in writing. He/she probably has a good academic prose style, and good research skills, along with a jstor subscription or nearby university library. Quite possibly, he did a liberal arts or social science degree, which gave him the necessary practice; but found the job market unexciting with those credentials. Those things would equip him to produce adequate material in a wide variety of writing-heavy areas. If his skill is in writing, and he gets enough business, why would he turn away paying customers in order to brush up on his math, which, unless he has a genuinely unusual talent in the area, could take a couple of years? Presumably(and, taking a quick look at rentacoder, certainly), there are equivalent people who specialize in math, CS, and science. If his area of comparative advantage is writing, why go up against people who have a comparative advantage in other areas?
There are, effectively, two kinds of "SD card slot". The one, most common on desktops, and only slightly less so on laptops, and basically 100% of external readers, actually implements the SD communications protocol internally and then presents the contents of the device to the host machine as a simple USB mass storage class memory device.
The second, most common in PDAs and the like, and found on some laptops(if it supports SDIO it is definitely one of these) actually connects the host device directly to the SD card, and it is up to the driver to speak the SD protocol.
I wonder if the behavior of these nuked cards differs between those two types of reader, and if it would be possible to get more useful information from the latter sort, or by having a look at it via I2C directly...
If you insert a card with a munged and/or not-recognized-by-windows FS/partition structure in any reasonably recent windows box, it will just ask you if you would like to format it. Excellent way to lose a giant chunk of data stored on an HFS+ or extN volume; but otherwise pretty noob friendly...
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I loaded the newegg homepage a few minutes ago and(by pure happenstance) they were offering a 35x optical zoom Canon point-and-shoot for a hair under $400. I'm guessing that a real lens snob who can afford something that gets its own tripod and looks like an anti-tank weapon would be driven to tears by the optical artefacts(particularly around the edge of the frame); but with a tiny tripod and some adequate image stabilization wizardry(yours standard on the nicer point-and-shoots) I suspect that you can get pretty adequate results from something that neither is, nor even looks like, a DSLR...
You'd better include a major slice of American rentacops and nebulous security agencies, along with a fair percentage of the citizens they so zealously 'protect'; along with Kuwait...
It sounds like classic security theatre to me. It has, somehow, become an article of faith in jackboot circles(the world over, apparently; our Limey friends on Airstrip One seem to be the most enthusiastic; but the notion is international in its appeal) that 'terrorists' simply cannot function without extremely high quality photographs, taken personally with professional grade equipment, even if their target is some tourist trap with 10+ million publicly available images on the web... It has further, somehow, become an article of faith(among both jackboots and photo-n00bs) that DLSRs are the magic ticket to being the next Ansel Adams, while anything without interchangeable lenses might as well be a webcam from 1993.
How exactly these beliefs persist, I'm not quite sure, when any moron who spends ten minutes in the camera aisle at Best Buy can see that contemporary happy-snapper gear is pretty competent(particularly when paired with contemporary flash memory that will give said happy-snapper 10,000 chances to get it right for under $40...) and trivially available stuff like Photosynth demonstrates the power of huge numbers of shoddy images combined with some algorithmic cleverness...
Wasn't this exact method(COTS audio recorder + playback attack) used in Wargames? Circa 1983?
If anything, the only surprise here is that criminals were ever not taking advantage of cheap MP3 player/recorder hardware. The economies of scale with your basic anonymous fleabay-special "designers MP5 player" are stupendous, and most of the (comparatively) difficult stuff is in software, which is an easier trail to hide...
The situation is arguably a little more nuanced than that...
You can get long term support in closed ecosystems, even very closed ones(just ask the nice chap from IBM Mainframe sales...); but it'll cost you. Often a great deal and you had better be sure that the vendor is contractually on board; because they can, otherwise, pull the rug out from under you at their option(If they stop selling product X licenses/support contracts, you pretty much have to stop using product X. Game over. Copyright law. Have a nice day.).
OSS, by contrast, allocates support largely by popularity, with the option of using money to modify that allocation. If Project Y is popular, you might end up getting years of long term support for free. If it isn't, nobody can force you to drop it; but it might not be cheap to stick with it, if you need to make changes to keep using it(whether or not this is an issue varies widely: if you just need some internal OSS stack to boot in a VM, you can probably do that until the sun engulfs the inner planets for basically nothing. If you want someone to make Linux 2.2 run on your company's fleet of laptops so some creaky monstrosity can continue to be used, it'll take real money to silence the laughter of the needed kernel developers...)
Arguably, it might actually be getting less likely that Nvidia will ever provide decent OSS support...
Intel has all-but-formally-announced their intention to lock Nvidia out of everything they can, as fast as the feds will let them. On die-video, no QPI licence, trimming PCIe lanes off lower end products, etc. AMD has not been as frankly rude about it; but their on-die video will be even more competent than Intel's, and they control a smaller slice of the market, in any case. Pretty much across the board, Nvidia can reasonably expect to be shoved out of anything too small, power-constrained, thermal-constrained, or cost-constrained to have either a full discrete GPU(in laptops) or a full PCIe expansion slot, populated,(desktops/servers).
Unless they can think of some fairly clever pushback, and fast, this will leave them with a market of A)Enthusiast gamers(who tend to run Windows and replace GPUs frequently) B)Serious CAD/Visualization guys(who may or may not run Windows; but whose Very Expensive software packages depend on Nvidia's 'makes the train run on time' approach to OpenGL support, rather than software freedom, seemless OSX integration, or still working in 5 years) and C) GPU compute types (who, again, are running very expensive software on very expensive hardware, and care that it works and, if they are large enough, that they can get engineering support). None of these markets place a premium on FOSS drivers, and most of them make driver quality and featurefulness a major part of Nvidia's competitive advantage(going from 'foremost provider of GPU computing solutions' to 'just another fabless silicon vendor whose stuff will work if you target Gallium3D' would be bad news for Nvidia...).
AMD and Intel, on the other hand, while deadly rivals, are in virtually identical positions RE: FOSS drivers: For their low-end stuff, drivers are just a pain in the ass. Especially for Intel, if team Linux will overlook their suckitude because their ttys come back after suspend, or whatever it happens to be, that is a pure win. They are both racing to make low to midrange GPU capabilities just part of the CPU, and it is very much to their advantage if all their CPU capabilities are Just Supported on whatever OSes the market cares about. I would expect to see increasing divergence in strategy between Intel/AMD on the one hand and Nvidia on the other.
AD's set of default group policy templates only makes it trivial for IE; but you can also impose login, logoff, startup, shutdown, and a bunch of other locations for running arbitrary scripts/programs.
Most browsers, and any other programs that have SSL-related business, either store their set of trusted certs/authorities as a set of certificate files in some reasonably easily discoverable directory or piggyback IE's settings. If the former, you just execute a trivial file-copy script via group policy any time before the user has a chance to see the scary message. If the latter, you just use the IE method.
The problem isn't the 'reasonableness' of the penalty; but the dubiousness of the process. A private party pulling a standard of evidence and a due process of proof out of their ass and then sending monetary demands to those they deem guilty is vigilantism at best and shades pretty quickly into extortion. The size of the amount being extorted isn't the issue, the extortion is....
I must object to the use of the term "fine". A "fine" is a monetary penalty imposed under color of law as punishment, or part of a punishment, for a violation of the code of laws, demonstrated in a court of law according to due process.
Calling a private party's essentially extortionate demand to pay up or face (ruinously expensive even if innocent) legal action a "fine" is acccording it far too much legitimacy.
Sure, as a matter of probability, not all the threat letters will miss their mark, and some percentage will in fact be sent to people who downloaded and/or uploaded the game in violation of applicable law in their jurisdiction; but even those cases will hew to no established standards of evidence or due process. Given the known sloppiness(and clear perverse incentives involved) of these sorts of things a fair few won't even be accidentally correct, they'll simply be pure extortion without even coincidental overlap with justice.
No matter how much you hate copyright infringement, conflating vigilante 'justice' with process of law is dangerously sloppy. I don't know whether the CD Projekt spokesweasel is simply internally sloppy, or engaged in deliberate spin; but it is unacceptable.
That question really seems to depend on your budget and your motherboard...
If you are in the really cheap seats, you should probably spend whatever audio money you have on speakers or headphones that don't utterly suck. OK speakers/headphone drivers are still much trickier than OK silicon amps and DACs. On the other hand, a lot of today's fancy motherboards are happy to output S/PDIF in your choice of optical or electrical, which lets the DACs and amplification in your receiver, which can be of virtually arbitrary niceness, do the job. I'm sure there is some way that realtek can manage to fuck up dumping a pure digital bitstream across a purely digital bus; but it'll take some doing.
Only in the middle, where you have speakers/headphones nice enough to hear subtle imperfections(or just cranked so loud that you are getting repeatedly trampled into the noise floor) and the budget left over for a nice discrete card does it really make any sense. That and, of course, application specific stuff like audio recording, since motherboards don't exactly come with a bevy of XLR jacks...
The days when all that software positional audio dragged your overclocked celeron 333 down and wrecked your FPS framerates just aren't really with us anymore...
Not that easy. Liability allocation.
Something like a car, in a natural environment(not some empty closed test-track stuff), will suffer an accident from time to time. Human error, mechanical issues, sensor faults, algorithmic fuckups, whatever.
With a human driver(who basically all juries trivially recognize as an autonomous agent, since they think of all reasonably functional humans as such), the liability for accidents typically falls on one of the operators, unless a mechanical fault, braking issue, or something of that sort can be proven.
With an autonomous control computer, a jury will be much more likely to see the "driver" as an extension of the company who built the car, just like the brakes or the steering column, and assign liability accordingly.
Even if, lets say, computer-controlled cars delivered a 10-fold reduction in morbidity and mortality(which would save something like 35,000 Americans a year from death, plus an unknown but even larger number from serious injury, just to put things in perspective), that would likely be a net increase in liability for the vehicle manufacturers.
Until autonomous vehicles prove superior safety and insurers and/or legislators recognize the new state of affairs, it'll be strictly test tracks, tech demos, and internal use....
I'd be inclined to guess that the easier(and for many purposes more important) area of computer supremacy won't be in absolute speed(outside of carefully-controlled-for-robotic advantage environments like pick-and-place machines and closed rail tracks); but in sheer endurance.
Assuming that you don't totally cheap out on the fault tolerance or get horribly unlucky, the autonomous car should be able to complete the course every 27 minutes, with occasional pauses for refueling, and longer; but even more occasional pauses for hardware service on the car, virtually forever. That expert human driver, though, will do 17 minutes a number of times; but will be a downright danger to himself and others within 24 hours or so.
For many applications(municipal bus service and low-priority-low-cost mail delivery and commodity trucking/train deliver come to mind), it is virtually irrelevant what a top-notch human in fresh condition can do. What matters is either how many of those you can afford as spares, or what an exhausted, bored, hopped-up-on-stimulants-just-to-stay-awake human can do. Computers, on the other hand, may take longer than one would expect to catch up with best of breed humans in anything resembling natural conditions; but will be able to catch up with real world, performance-degraded humans considerably faster...
I'm guessing that the "gated communities for the affluent" comment is going to come back to bite him.
For one, American political discourse tends to shy away from anything that can even be remotely described as "class warfare". His comment doesn't really qualify; but once boiled into a contextless soundbite and replayed a few bazillion times on the news channels of the same cable companies on whose toes he is stepping, it sure will sound like it.
Second, it seems most likely that the rent-seeking model of tiered internet providers will be much closer to that of cable TV or old-school telco providers: that is, massive rent seeking; but much broader availability than "gated community" would imply. Everyone pays too much for cable, and everyone used to pay too much for long distance; but the companies realized that gouging everyone a bit was much more profitable than gouging half of the top quintile a lot. It may well end up being the case that only the affluent(and specifically the techy affluent) will be able to afford access to the real internet, as opposed to the "facebook and youtube over IP channel"; but that is too subtle a point to play in soundbites.
Third, and perhaps most serious, Telcos and Cable companies are actually superbly positioned to make a (dishonest; but superficially convincing) "friend of the common man" play. They are, in fact, bloated rent-seeking conglomerates; but, by the simple necessities of operating an infrastructure business, bloated rent-seeking conglomerates with very, very broad-based operations.
Most of the rents go right up the food chain to the big fish; but Verizon, Comcast, et al. have to have installers and linesmen, and technicians and whatnot in virtually every city and town. These guys aren't seeing much of those rents being collected, and are themselves paying too much for cable; but they know who their employers are. Also, since the marginal cost of adding an extra internet subscriber is nearly zero, doling out cheap/free internet access to schools, community centers, youth-centers-to-keep-at-risk-kids-off-the-street-after-school, etc. is very easy, very cheap, and good PR. All that adds up to a massive PR bonus in a broad based group of community groups, blue collar, semi-skilled and skilled tradesmen, and the like.(Obviously, it isn't as though a neutral internet wouldn't need linesmen, and a competitive internet would provide cheaper internet not as part of a cynical charity effort; but that isn't immediately visible...) This, along with a few modest, but strategic, monetary donations to the correct local charities, can be converted into a torrent of letters of support from various worthy local anti-poverty groups.
By contrast, tech companies tend to have fairly geographically narrow(or, even if geographically distributed, as with Google, Akamai, and friends, pretty lightly staffed, mostly with engineers and programmers and such) operations and human resources bases. Their customer bases are fairly broad, and they are often much more popular than the local Telcos and Cable outfits(only paranoid privacy geeks hate Google, while cable companies are about as popular as the IRS); but they have much less of the sort of presence that can translate into thousands of letters from the "grassroots". The tech guys do benefit a great many people; but most of them in smaller, subtler ways. Outside of areas that are virtually company towns, or highly-educated startup hotbeds, there is virtually no blue-ish collar bread-and-butter coming out of the tech industry(particularly since, for anything that can be shipped, hardware assembly is largely offshore). Internet competition and tech company services are likely to save everyone some dollars a month, in addition to the free speech and innovation benefits; but that isn't nearly as concrete as having a layer of people, coast to coast, whose checks you sign...
What I always wonder about with these waste-to-energy-it's-like-incineration-but-not-that-bad-kind-you-remember schemes is what happens with waste that is nasty on the level of the elements it contains, rather than just chemically.
If you burn something hard enough(not always something you can expect a real-world plant to do, with out considerable care; but we'll be charitable) virtually anything that is nasty because of its chemical structure is no longer your problem. That's why they incinerate chemical weapons, after all. With things like lead, cadmium, mercury, chlorine, etc. though, that are just tactless at the atomic level, about all you can do is produce aerosols, oxides, or both. Those then rain down merrily on the surrounding environment and proceed to do their thing.
Unfortunately, especially with modern plastics-and-electronics waste, which is very hard to separate economically from the rest of the stuff, such elements are all over the place. Your average widget from two christmasses ago probably contains a decent amount of chlorine, in the form of PVC insulation and the like, possibly some NiCads, bromated flame retardants, maybe some pre-ROHS leaded board or components, and possibly some plastic dyes that you don't really want to be burning(for instance, most of the world's cadmium that doesn't go into batteries goes either into optoelectronics or lightfast dyes for plastics. Lovely yellows and reds can be achieved)...
If there were some giant stream of nice, clean FDA-approved-for-food-contact polystyrene or something, burning it would produce pretty much nothing but the co2 and water, possibly a bit of carbon black, that you'd expect from looking at a basic chem textbook. With real world waste streams, though, there is so much ancillary crap in there that bad results are positively to be expected. It might still be better than coal, or better than incomplete combustion in a 19th century tech incinerator or Bubba's burn pit; but it isn't going to be pretty.
I get the impression that, even in nearly open-and-shut cases, contingency-fee lawyers have a quite logical disinterest in relatively poor defendants.
Since the contingency-fee guys aren't merely paid only if they win, they are paid only out of the winnings, their effective hourly rate is going to suck unless the defendant is relatively wealthy and relatively guilty(or extremely quick to knock over, as in these mass-mail extortion cases, which are probably incredibly cheap per-"case" to process, though, of course, setting up a mass-extortion operation could and has been, done with conventional fee and flat fee lawyers as well).
It is the case that the procedural costs and delays of justice are just too high, so all solutions will be imperfect; but the idea that contingency fee lawyers are a menace to relatively poor defendants, outside of reasonably rare cases, just seems economically implausible.
I don't think that blaming contingency-basis laywers as a general institution is all that accurate(and their lack can be positively harmful).
Because contingency-basis lawyers have to win cases in order to get paid, they arguably have to hew to a more selective standard than do standard per-hour lawyers. If I'm getting my hourly rate, I'll pretty much do whatever legal faffing you want, as long as it won't get me disbarred or otherwise open me to trouble that isn't worth it. If I get absolutely nothing until I win, I'm going to give the winnability(note, this is not identical with merit) of your case a very good look....
Now, the fact that winnability and merit are not identical, either because(as in this case) they are simply engaging in extortion outside the courtroom, or because(as in some malpractice cases) juries are simple emotional saps is a problem, and contingency-basis lawyers will(as a body that acts roughly value-rationally on average) be willing to take winnable cases whether or not they are justly winnable; but so will standard-fee lawyers(who will also be willing to take unwinnable cases, just or unjust, or harassment cases).
Plus, contingency-basis laywers are, in many cases, the only thing preventing access to justice(particularly civil justice) from being even more ludicrously lopsided than it already is. Criminal defendants have a right to an(often mediocre, horribly overworked) laywer, shockingly "law and order" plays better than "pay more public defenders"... People who have been wronged civilly have to get their own. Since lawyers aren't cheap, this pretty much means that civil justice for anybody who isn't at least upper-middle-class(or sticking strictly to small claims court) is available through a contingency-fee lawyer or not at all. Given the frequency with which civil wrongs are committed down the economic totem pole, "not at all" seems like a pretty lousy option...
The fact that it is possible to win unjust cases, and sometimes simply extort people, is a problem that needs to be addressed. The fact that there are lawyers who are willing to share their client's fate is, if anything, more conducive to justice than the alternative. Contingency-fee lawyers may be like cops who get a cut of the fine(if we consider fines that have to be demonstrated in court, not that "asset forfeiture" crap); in that they will swarm like flies over anything winnable in court; but hourly laywers are like mercenaries, in that they will do the bidding of whoever is paying them, without regard for winnability, much less justice, excepting only actions likely to make them liable to more punishment than is worth it.
If I were going to forbid a type of lawyer-payment arrangement, I'd actually say that justice would be better served by forbidding non-contingency lawyers(except in criminal cases, since a great many of those involve no money, only jail time, changing hands). A contingency-lawyer has to do the best job he can, on the best cases he can, or starve. A fee-based lawyer has to do the best job he can, on whatever his client is paying him to do, or starve. One will necessarily hew to winnability(whose relationship to justice is something that can be controlled by public policy), while the other will be a freelance heavy in the service of his client's economic interests...
I'm assuming that this is some legal analog of that trope from just about every special operations/spy themed violence drama ever made: "We are sending you to do something dangerous and illegal and highly advantageous to us. If it goes well, congratulations all around and we weren't involved. If it goes poorly, we've never heard of you before, and if we had than you must have gone rogue and been acting without authorization and we have nothing to do with it..."
Who is "they"? Any recent Linux kernel should be able to support a device such as that shown in the video with a userspace libUSB driver, no modification required. X might take some poking to get it to accept the existence of 10 cursors; but that is a totally distinct project. Then, of course, you have the zillions of programs that are going to need to do something useful with those exotic inputs...(and reasonable availability of that hardware device, and some place to put it along with your keyboard).
It is arguably a weakness of Linux; but there isn't really any "they" to do that. Anybody could; but there isn't really anybody in a position to.
They aren't compiling the kernel to see how long it will take(which, as you say, is rarely of all that much interest, few people do it and a fast build-box isn't going to break the budget of a serious project), they are using a multithreaded kernel compilation as an easy way to generate lots of non-interactive system load to see how much that degrades the performance, actual and perceived, of the various interactive tasks of interest to the desktop user.
This isn't about improving performance of any one specific program; but about making a reasonably heavily-loaded system much more pleasant to use. Compiling the kernel is just a trivial way to generate a large amount of non-interactive CPU load and a bit of disk thrashing...
That's not a kernel patch... That's a bash script that forcibly installs BeOS!
The question is, though, whether there is no STEM because this guy doesn't do STEM work, or because there is less cheating in STEM...
With our cheating-outsourcer sample size of 1, it is difficult to say.
Some poor saps persist in believing otherwise(hence the usual 1-required-ethics-course-per-MBA-course-of-study...); but the study of ethical philosophy and behaving ethically really don't have much to do with one another.
There are, arguably, a few cases that are genuine conundrums, where "ethical common sense" doesn't tell you anything, and you have to call in the professionals; but the vast majority of the time the person in the situation isn't acting ethically because they know ethics, or unethically because they don't, they just either care or don't(sorry Plato).
In fact, it might actually be easier to study ethics, as a matter of philosophy, if you are an amoral sociopath yourself. For normal people, so many ethical conclusions are simply blindingly commonsensical. It takes an active effort of will to ignore that and focus on why 'ethical' is what it is. For an amoral sociopath, treating 'ethical' as a dispassionate exercise in descriptive taxonomy and constructing theoretical patterns and structures that govern it is much simpler, no emotionally salient ethical instincts to get in the way.
An analogous situation might be an atheist studying theology. An atheist doesn't believe in god, so their study of theology would have no operational relevance; but they will be fully capable of doing textual analysis of whatever 'sacred' text you plunk in front of them, in exactly the way an English major could analyze the character of 'Tom Sawyer' from the text, without believing in his existence.
I suspect a combination of two factors:
1. Humanities and soft sciences, in my experience, tend to be taught in courses whose grading depends much more on take-home essays than in class exams. Unless you have a smartphone with a nice camera, and a very on-the-ball internet cheating service, you can't really cheat in class over the internet; but doing so on a take home is absolutely trivial. Math and hard sciences often have take-home problem sets, some even worth a few points; but those are mostly just drill/practice for the exams that will curb-stomp you if you haven't done the work outside of class.
2. I'm sure that internet cheating is a large enough business to support specialization of labor. The writer of TFA clearly specializes in writing. He/she probably has a good academic prose style, and good research skills, along with a jstor subscription or nearby university library. Quite possibly, he did a liberal arts or social science degree, which gave him the necessary practice; but found the job market unexciting with those credentials. Those things would equip him to produce adequate material in a wide variety of writing-heavy areas. If his skill is in writing, and he gets enough business, why would he turn away paying customers in order to brush up on his math, which, unless he has a genuinely unusual talent in the area, could take a couple of years? Presumably(and, taking a quick look at rentacoder, certainly), there are equivalent people who specialize in math, CS, and science. If his area of comparative advantage is writing, why go up against people who have a comparative advantage in other areas?
There are, effectively, two kinds of "SD card slot". The one, most common on desktops, and only slightly less so on laptops, and basically 100% of external readers, actually implements the SD communications protocol internally and then presents the contents of the device to the host machine as a simple USB mass storage class memory device.
The second, most common in PDAs and the like, and found on some laptops(if it supports SDIO it is definitely one of these) actually connects the host device directly to the SD card, and it is up to the driver to speak the SD protocol.
I wonder if the behavior of these nuked cards differs between those two types of reader, and if it would be possible to get more useful information from the latter sort, or by having a look at it via I2C directly...
If you insert a card with a munged and/or not-recognized-by-windows FS/partition structure in any reasonably recent windows box, it will just ask you if you would like to format it. Excellent way to lose a giant chunk of data stored on an HFS+ or extN volume; but otherwise pretty noob friendly...