They may be able to prove you viewed child porn, by having used a honey pot, and tracking your IP address/etc.. That is enough to get a warrant to search your computer for evidence of wrongdoing, where they will find the proof that it was actually you. If all they have is logs from a honey pot, then you can still argue that you have an open wifi and it was a drive-by hacker who committed the crime.
In other words, they may not know the exact content of your hard drive, but they may know enough to get a warrant to search.
Didn't say they get it right... they owe me $1500 this year, and if they had gotten it right, we'd be even without my needing to file.:) (but I'd still need to file, because I still have deductions for things like charitable donations, public transit, RRSP contributions, etc.)
I'm in Ontario, Canada. While things are different in Quebec, my understanding is that the rest of the provinces are set up the same way. The way payroll is handled is that they assume you will be making no deductions, and that every time they put money into your account, it's 1/26th of your annual salary, and deduct the appropriate tax. (or 1/24th if you get paid twice a month instead of bi-weekly). Unless you get a *big* raise halfway through the year which puts you into a different tax bracket, they never deduct too little. Then when you do file, you get deductions for things like public transportation (15% of what you spend on things like a bus pass from your payable taxes), RRSP contributions (reduce your taxable income), charitable donations (reduce your taxable income), tuition (payable taxes), etc., so that they end up owing you money. In my entire life, I have always gotten a refund at the end of the year, though one year the refund was all of about $75, usually it's more than enough of a refund to make it worth hiring an accountant to do the taxes for me.:)
I'm not even under the TSA's jurisdiction, and I have more liking for my own country's tax collectors than I do for the TSA. At least the tax collectors are performing a public service that actually serves the greater good. The TSA, on the other hand, is nothing more than security theater that has severely impacted my own life, in that I no longer feel comfortable travelling to the US or over US airspace. And I'm certain that I'm not the only one... so not only is the TSA a multi-billion dollar boondoggle that doesn't actually accomplish anything, it's actually taking money out of the US economy in the form of deterring international travellers from visiting. Pity. You used to have a really nice country, for a while, but there's plenty of other places in the world that will happily take my money, and won't humiliate me for the privilege.
Besides, the way the tax system is set up here, they always take money off at the source, and at the end of the year I get a refund for any overage they took off: unless you're self-employed, it's very rare that you end up owing the government money.
You're either not an English native speaker, being intentionally pedantic, or trolling. I'm not sure which. I'll try to give you the benefit of the doubt.
Idiomatically speaking, in English (and most languages I speak, actually), when you refer to next + day of week, you mean X day, next week. The same holds true for French, Spanish and German (at least, I don't speak other languages), and is a speech pattern that predates the discovery of the Americas. So no, it's not something that's endemic to the American South, it's something that you'd have to have been living under a rock to have never heard in the English language.
If it helps you sleep at night, consider it an ellipsis. Next Thursday = "Next week, Thursday". English is lazy like that. When you say it's happening on Thursday, the "next" you're looking for is implicit. Similarly, because it's implicit when you simply say "Thursday", its presence indicates that the phrase has a different meaning.
nobody forces you to keep it... if you configure your browser to make it go away when you close the browser (and there's even addons for Chrome/Chromium to do that), then the "history" only lasts as long as your browser is open.
Because once the trip takes 12hrs or longer, they have to feed you. That means bringing perishables along for the ride, as well as hiring staff to prepare it. Some long-distance train hauls can take more than 7 days. If they don't have to feed you, and aren't worried about your comfort, it's a lot cheaper.
While some flights do include meals, they're usually prepared on the ground and flash frozen, to be microwaved in the air. And the flight is usually over soon enough that they don't need to worry about more than one meal, which means that the passengers are usually willing to accept a lower quality meal, too.
That being said, there's no reason that a space elevator won't see exactly the same type of use that trains/airplanes see. It's slow, but there's no reason it can't be used for heavy lifting. Many more trips can be made by space elevator on a yearly basis, and when the rockets no longer need to lift supplies into space, and only the people, the cost of using a rocket to get into space should go down accordingly.
If you're responsible for maintaining a corporate network that still has IE5 as part of its ecosystem, then a) you should be fired, and b) you won't need to worry about it for much longer, because MS is going to force an upgrade on you, and you probably don't know how to prevent it.
Users at home? Perhaps a different story. Though XP has been out for more than 10 years, and that's well beyond the replacement lifecycle of most computers (recall that XP shipped with IE6 out of the box), and most ISP's don't even support pre-XP SP2 any more... the folks who know enough to keep a computer working well for 10+ years are not in the demographic I'd be worried about still using IE5. According to this link, IE5 isn't even in the top 12 browsers world-wide, and number 12 on that list was 0.22% of the global market share in January. I don't think IE5 is something you need to worry about any more... IE6 maybe, but that is being forced out by a mandatory MS update, meaning that before too long, the only people who will still be running IE6 are in the corporate world.
There will always be idiot users, but if you know what you're doing as a network administrator, almost everything you listed won't actually be a problem for you: with the exception of people needing things "plugged back in", none of what you listed would be a problem at my office... even for the resetting of passwords, anybody on my team (who reports to the same manager) can do a manual password reset on the intranet. I get an e-mail saying it's been done and by whom, and that e-mail is cc'd to my manager, so if somebody starts abusing it, it's easy to figure out who. And even the "plugging things in" thing shouldn't be a problem, because the only thing users *can* plug in at their workstation is a keyboard/mouse. (well, and a thumb drive, but most of us have a system policy on our profiles that prevents Windows from mounting external storage)
From the point of view of the person on the receiving end, it won't make any noise until it hits.
From the point of view of the sender, depending on the type of weapon being used (let's assume a chemical propellant, as that'll make the most noise), it'll make a loud noise that'll die off quickly as the gases disperse in the vacuum. Energy-based weapons, or magnetically propelled weapons will likely make less noise, or possibly a continual hum of electronics as capacitors charge with no discernable difference when the weapon is firing. And let's be honest: until "phasers" become a reality, a gauss gun is far more likely for space combat than a chemically propelled missile, because you would need to carry less fuel.
From the point of view of the camera watching the fireworks from several kilometers (or hundreds of kilometers) away, it won't make any noise at all.
Only once have you actually seen sound depicted in space? And you say you've seen a *lot* of scifi? I've seen sound depicted in Star Trek and Star Wars, not to mention hundreds of other shows and movies. Firefly stands out from the crowd because it's the only one I can think of which actually depicted no sound at all in space.
Or do you perhaps mean conversation? In that case, Spaceballs is the only one I can think of where characters actually carried out a conversation in space, without the benefit of space suits or any kind of environmental protection.
Article II: Each non-NWS party undertakes not to receive, from any source, nuclear weapons, or other nuclear explosive devices; not to manufacture or acquire such weapons or devices; and not to receive any assistance in their manufacture.
If I were a major computer manufacturer these days, I'd spec in AMD CPUs (Black Editions, etc.), then attach a self-contained coolant system to it, and crank it until it reached the temperatures that the i7 normally operates at. The $500 in cost savings would appeal to my customers, and I'd be able to price my competitors out of the market.
Now what if I were to tell you that you can get a motherboard that ticks all the same boxes as the other one, for $129? ( http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813157271 ). That brings the total cost down to $498. Could you please enlighten me on how it is possible to *save* $500 by building an AMD solution instead of Intel, when the Intel option is less than $500, at retail?
The only consumers spending over $1000 on a CPU are the folks with too much money and not enough brains. And while you can spend that much on an extreme edition 6-core Intel processor, you're forgetting that it's also overclockable, by about 30%, and that you'd really be pushing things if you tried to get an FX6 running stably at 4.5GHz. You'd also be forgetting that unless something is massively parallel, the i7 still retains a performance edge over the bulldozer architecture. Chiefly, though, you'd be forgetting that for 99% of what you do, you'll never see the difference between the i7 2700 and the FX6, except perhaps that the ability to use a small SSD as a cache drive to improve spinny platter drive performance, something that's built into the Intel Z68 motherboard chipset and, at least last I checked, didn't exist on the AMD platform, would actually give the i7 a boost in real world usage, for significantly less price (pair a 32GB SSD with a 3TB spinny platter drive, and you get the write speed of the SSD, coupled with the capacity of the spinny platter drive). You may see a performance increase in things like video encoding, depending on the software you're using, but it's not going to get you any more frames per second in Skyrim. And truthfully? When I rip a DVD, I queue up the transcode in Handbrake before I go to bed, set it to turn the computer off when it's done, and don't really care if it finishes 2 minutes earlier.
I just think it's 50 cents off a $15 purchase I never would have made. I still don't want to spend the $14.50. It's like buying stuff in a grocery store just because it's on sale, I won't buy something I don't need just because the price is lower. That's idiotic.
That's the wrong way to use coupons/sales. And yes, it is idiotic. But there is a reason that many *wealthy* families use coupons: used properly, they can cut down on your cost of living by a significant amount.
Case in point: right now, my regular grocery store is having a sale... $3.99/lb for beef roasts, or about half of the normal cost for this particular cut. A large roast will still cost you $25 or more, but that is half the cost, and it's something you may buy anyway. They also currently have pork tenderloin on sale, and another grocery store I visit regularly has chicken legs on sale (great for making soup, and as a soup, it isn't adversely affected by freezing for a month or two until needed). By adjusting my habits to buy food that's on sale, I can save large amounts of money over time. And since I have to buy *something*, why wouldn't I buy the cut of meat that's on sale for half off? And to carry it further, if I have the freezer space, and am more concerned with cost than quality, why wouldn't I buy large amounts when it's on sale and freeze it? I know people who never pay full price for food, and when your food budget could be higher than your rent budget (try having a family with 2 adults and 4 teenagers, some time), that's a substantial savings.
The argument could be made that this is already the case, with "expendable" soldiers acting as the avatars for politicians or other unscrupulous sorts.
To a certain extent, yes. But human lives still have value, if not to the politicians, to the military leaders calling the shots, and to the people who have to read about it in the paper.
Consider: a little shy of 4,500 US soldiers have died in Iraq since hostilities began in 2003, and nearly 33,000 have been wounded. Stalin wrote that 1,000 deaths is a tragedy, 1,000,000 is a statistic, and the same holds true for this conflict: 4,500 dead is a *lot*, but it's a number most of us can wrap our heads around, and relate to. Quite aside from the human face that we see in the media, we can understand what 4,500 dead men and women means. Now consider that instead of 4,500 dead soldiers and 33,000 wounded, we have robots destroyed, or damaged but repairable. The folks sitting in a bunker controlling the robots, however, are unharmed. Finally consider: the US estimates that it costs about $150,000 to train a soldier. If we give these robots a unit cost equivalent to a cruise missile, at about $125,000 each. Now, not only is it cheaper to lose a robot, but there's no human face on the losses, and we no longer see the mothers of slain soldiers confronting the president on the evening news.
Those declaring war don't have to pay the ultimate cost, but there is a human cost that they have to deal with. If you remove that human cost, they are more likely to go to war. This cannot end well: the best possible scenario is that your enemy also has semi-autonomous robots controlled by telepresence, at which point who wins becomes a question of who throws the most money at the battlefield. And if that's going to be the case, why do we need this? We can already wage economic wars, and in fact, are already waging several.
If we reduce the relative risk of going to war, we remove the reasons not to. "Worth" takes on a whole new meaning, when you don't have as much to lose.
How is making a movie and R&D'ing a technology Apples to Apples enough for this to be worthy of so many question marks?
No. But in this case, the difference is enough to warrant the question marks: it *should* cost a lot less to simply develop a mockup of how something should work than to actually build that tool.
Now, Avatar did involve developing a few new technologies for the entertainment industry, but the point stands: if Avatar cost a quarter of a billion dollars to make, actually building the technology that Avatar is describing should cost more, shouldn't it? $7 million is a teacup in the ocean.
That being said, I don't think that TFA is talking about mind-machine interface, it's talking about telepresence. There's a world of difference between them, in that telepresence has already been done, and is being done on a semi-regular basis. It'll be a *lot* cheaper to build a bipedal robot that's controlled by telepresence than it would be to build one that's controlled by MMI.
Try Bodhi Linux... they're a minimalist Ubu derivative, and e17 is the only officially supported DE. It's based on LTS, so as of this writing, some of the stuff might be a little outdated, but they maintain their own versions of a *lot* of software, in their own repos, so it is mostly up to date (and it's pretty much on the bleeding edge when it comes to E builds, with a new one usually every couple of weeks... the lead developer is very much in contact with the e17 developers, and is keeping it up to date). It still ties in to Ubuntu's repos, though, so anything that's in Ubu's repos will work on Bodhi, too, and they have software packs available for anybody who wants to have the "everything including the kitchen sink" set up that Ubuntu seems to prefer in their distro.
e17 has that. It's part of the "composite" module. Load it, and set up a binding to launch the pager... perhaps different names for it, but essentially the same effect. I have mine set up with edge bindings on the screen... I put the mouse in the bottom right, it launches the "scale pager", which is essentially an expo-like desktop switcher. I put it in the top left, it launches scale for all windows on the current desktop, and bottom left is bound to scale for all desktops.
Surprisingly light on resources, too. Despite having the desktop compositor loaded, as well as a calendar widget, a clock widget, and a few other desktop blingy things, enlightenment itself is only using 49MB of RAM on my system as I type this. And there's some truly beautiful themes in existence for it, giving it the potential to be an absolutely gorgeous system, while still being very easy and intuitive to work with.
There's even a few distros built around e17 as their core offering... my personal favourite (and the distro this laptop has installed) is Bodhi Linux (http://bodhilinux.com)
e17 would be my desktop of choice... entirely modular, so if you just want a basic window manager with nothing else, you can have that, but if you prefer a full blown desktop environment, you can have that, too. What I have mine set up as is somewhere in between... I guess you could call it a desktop environment, in that there is a sort of taskbar/launcher thing and I have a clock and calendar widget loaded, and I have compositing effects turned on, but it's a far cry from what you see from Gnome or KDE these days... even XFCE is getting too bloated for my liking, and it was never as pretty as e17 can be. And it's very light on system resources, too, in part because it's modular and you only need to load the modules you actually use... I've seen it shoehorned in to less than 40MB of RAM quite easily... on the system I'm typing this on right now, enlightenment is using 49MB of RAM, and that's with multiple widgets and compositing effects turned on that don't need to be.
Ultimately, though, it's a question of what works for you. If Fluxbox is to your liking, then awesome. It can be quite nice, too.
What they need to do is keep track of who gets scanned, and anybody who scans an unacceptable proportion of one gender versus the other gets fired, no compromises. (exactly 50/50 is probably not possible, but make the maximum acceptable ratio something like 48/52, proportionally adjusted to the population on the plane in question). Failing that, set up some kind of pattern for who gets scanned, like a fibonnacci sequence or something. And install video cameras in the screening room, angled so that you cannot see the display, but you can see anything pointed at the display (say viewing from 180 degrees). Put that camera on a live feed so that the passengers waiting in line can see it.
That also shows that AV software is, at best, a temporary measure. IMO the future is better OS security (and here MS is to blame), better application security (which is a budgetary and an education/knowledge problem).
So.... you're suggesting that the iOS method is the way to go?
As long as it's possible for users to run things with administrative privileges, viruses will have a way in through social engineering. And as long as it's possible to install stuff from vendors other than the OS manufacturer, there will be programs which think they need to run as admin, and users who let them. And the only way to get around that problem is to run a completely closed system, where users don't need to install drivers at all, and where they don't have any rights to run anything with administrative privileges. Even then, virus writers will find a way to harm you, and while it will no longer bring down the system, most virus writers don't want to bring down the system, they want to leave you with a usable system and steal some of your resources.
The sad reality is that AV is needed. It's never going to be a perfect solution, because the virus creators will always find new ways to do what they want to do. But it will still be needed, no matter how heavily you lock down the system.
39% support, of the people that voted.:) When you multiply that by the 65% or so that actually turned up at the polls, that translates to about 25% support. (don't feel like doing the math for the exact numbers)
To add to your suspicions... the blog in question is not one I've ever heard of. Now, I make no claims about being any sort of authority on the entire content of the Internet, but the first question that occurred to me on reading the summary was "does anybody here follow the blog in question, and if so, does it actually advocate piracy or promote the theft of property in any way?"
UK police are... special... at times. But they're not stupid. They wouldn't make a move against a website unless that website was actually doing something illegal. Coupled with your own information, I am now asking "is this an attempt to raise the profile of the blog, so that a few days from now when they are 'proven innocent', they'll have more hits?"
Considering that Samsung currently owns 95% of the OLED display market, it's not surprising that he'd say that. Picture quality (and thinness) is going to be the primary driver for OLED replacing LCD in the TV and monitor markets.
I disagree... OLED having a significantly better picture quality will make a difference for some people, yes. Early adopters. What will make the difference is when they start being cheaper than LCD's, for the majority of the market. Even then, it'll still take a while for OLED's to completely supplant LCD's, because of attrition.
My computer monitor is an OLED display. It was very expensive, but it *does* have a very high quality picture. I will not, however, be replacing my TV until I need to take it out and shoot it. It's a 4-year old LG 42" 1080p display, and has 2 component video inputs, 3 HDMI, a VGA, and a DVI. I don't need any more than that, and the picture is plenty good enough for the type of content I watch.
Enthusiasts will want the best possible picture quality. Casual TV watchers don't care, as long as it works. Heck, I *support* an IPTV service for work, and we still have customers watching on 13" CRT displays with coax only for the input.
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They may be able to prove you viewed child porn, by having used a honey pot, and tracking your IP address/etc.. That is enough to get a warrant to search your computer for evidence of wrongdoing, where they will find the proof that it was actually you. If all they have is logs from a honey pot, then you can still argue that you have an open wifi and it was a drive-by hacker who committed the crime.
In other words, they may not know the exact content of your hard drive, but they may know enough to get a warrant to search.
Didn't say they get it right... they owe me $1500 this year, and if they had gotten it right, we'd be even without my needing to file. :) (but I'd still need to file, because I still have deductions for things like charitable donations, public transit, RRSP contributions, etc.)
I'm in Ontario, Canada. While things are different in Quebec, my understanding is that the rest of the provinces are set up the same way. The way payroll is handled is that they assume you will be making no deductions, and that every time they put money into your account, it's 1/26th of your annual salary, and deduct the appropriate tax. (or 1/24th if you get paid twice a month instead of bi-weekly). Unless you get a *big* raise halfway through the year which puts you into a different tax bracket, they never deduct too little. Then when you do file, you get deductions for things like public transportation (15% of what you spend on things like a bus pass from your payable taxes), RRSP contributions (reduce your taxable income), charitable donations (reduce your taxable income), tuition (payable taxes), etc., so that they end up owing you money. In my entire life, I have always gotten a refund at the end of the year, though one year the refund was all of about $75, usually it's more than enough of a refund to make it worth hiring an accountant to do the taxes for me. :)
I'm not even under the TSA's jurisdiction, and I have more liking for my own country's tax collectors than I do for the TSA. At least the tax collectors are performing a public service that actually serves the greater good. The TSA, on the other hand, is nothing more than security theater that has severely impacted my own life, in that I no longer feel comfortable travelling to the US or over US airspace. And I'm certain that I'm not the only one... so not only is the TSA a multi-billion dollar boondoggle that doesn't actually accomplish anything, it's actually taking money out of the US economy in the form of deterring international travellers from visiting. Pity. You used to have a really nice country, for a while, but there's plenty of other places in the world that will happily take my money, and won't humiliate me for the privilege.
Besides, the way the tax system is set up here, they always take money off at the source, and at the end of the year I get a refund for any overage they took off: unless you're self-employed, it's very rare that you end up owing the government money.
You're either not an English native speaker, being intentionally pedantic, or trolling. I'm not sure which. I'll try to give you the benefit of the doubt.
Idiomatically speaking, in English (and most languages I speak, actually), when you refer to next + day of week, you mean X day, next week. The same holds true for French, Spanish and German (at least, I don't speak other languages), and is a speech pattern that predates the discovery of the Americas. So no, it's not something that's endemic to the American South, it's something that you'd have to have been living under a rock to have never heard in the English language.
If it helps you sleep at night, consider it an ellipsis. Next Thursday = "Next week, Thursday". English is lazy like that. When you say it's happening on Thursday, the "next" you're looking for is implicit. Similarly, because it's implicit when you simply say "Thursday", its presence indicates that the phrase has a different meaning.
nobody forces you to keep it... if you configure your browser to make it go away when you close the browser (and there's even addons for Chrome/Chromium to do that), then the "history" only lasts as long as your browser is open.
Hart rate? Are deer really that much of a problem on your bike rides?
Because once the trip takes 12hrs or longer, they have to feed you. That means bringing perishables along for the ride, as well as hiring staff to prepare it. Some long-distance train hauls can take more than 7 days. If they don't have to feed you, and aren't worried about your comfort, it's a lot cheaper.
While some flights do include meals, they're usually prepared on the ground and flash frozen, to be microwaved in the air. And the flight is usually over soon enough that they don't need to worry about more than one meal, which means that the passengers are usually willing to accept a lower quality meal, too.
That being said, there's no reason that a space elevator won't see exactly the same type of use that trains/airplanes see. It's slow, but there's no reason it can't be used for heavy lifting. Many more trips can be made by space elevator on a yearly basis, and when the rockets no longer need to lift supplies into space, and only the people, the cost of using a rocket to get into space should go down accordingly.
If you're responsible for maintaining a corporate network that still has IE5 as part of its ecosystem, then a) you should be fired, and b) you won't need to worry about it for much longer, because MS is going to force an upgrade on you, and you probably don't know how to prevent it.
Users at home? Perhaps a different story. Though XP has been out for more than 10 years, and that's well beyond the replacement lifecycle of most computers (recall that XP shipped with IE6 out of the box), and most ISP's don't even support pre-XP SP2 any more... the folks who know enough to keep a computer working well for 10+ years are not in the demographic I'd be worried about still using IE5. According to this link, IE5 isn't even in the top 12 browsers world-wide, and number 12 on that list was 0.22% of the global market share in January. I don't think IE5 is something you need to worry about any more... IE6 maybe, but that is being forced out by a mandatory MS update, meaning that before too long, the only people who will still be running IE6 are in the corporate world.
There will always be idiot users, but if you know what you're doing as a network administrator, almost everything you listed won't actually be a problem for you: with the exception of people needing things "plugged back in", none of what you listed would be a problem at my office... even for the resetting of passwords, anybody on my team (who reports to the same manager) can do a manual password reset on the intranet. I get an e-mail saying it's been done and by whom, and that e-mail is cc'd to my manager, so if somebody starts abusing it, it's easy to figure out who. And even the "plugging things in" thing shouldn't be a problem, because the only thing users *can* plug in at their workstation is a keyboard/mouse. (well, and a thumb drive, but most of us have a system policy on our profiles that prevents Windows from mounting external storage)
Accelerate an asteroid in our general direction, and hope we don't have an Al'kesh.
From the point of view of the person on the receiving end, it won't make any noise until it hits.
From the point of view of the sender, depending on the type of weapon being used (let's assume a chemical propellant, as that'll make the most noise), it'll make a loud noise that'll die off quickly as the gases disperse in the vacuum. Energy-based weapons, or magnetically propelled weapons will likely make less noise, or possibly a continual hum of electronics as capacitors charge with no discernable difference when the weapon is firing. And let's be honest: until "phasers" become a reality, a gauss gun is far more likely for space combat than a chemically propelled missile, because you would need to carry less fuel.
From the point of view of the camera watching the fireworks from several kilometers (or hundreds of kilometers) away, it won't make any noise at all.
Only once have you actually seen sound depicted in space? And you say you've seen a *lot* of scifi? I've seen sound depicted in Star Trek and Star Wars, not to mention hundreds of other shows and movies. Firefly stands out from the crowd because it's the only one I can think of which actually depicted no sound at all in space.
Or do you perhaps mean conversation? In that case, Spaceballs is the only one I can think of where characters actually carried out a conversation in space, without the benefit of space suits or any kind of environmental protection.
You mean, like article 2 of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which Iran has signed and ratified?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_non_proliferation_treaty
Article II: Each non-NWS party undertakes not to receive, from any source, nuclear weapons, or other nuclear explosive devices; not to manufacture or acquire such weapons or devices; and not to receive any assistance in their manufacture.
If I were a major computer manufacturer these days, I'd spec in AMD CPUs (Black Editions, etc.), then attach a self-contained coolant system to it, and crank it until it reached the temperatures that the i7 normally operates at. The $500 in cost savings would appeal to my customers, and I'd be able to price my competitors out of the market.
A core i7 2700k (unlocked for overclocking) only costs $369 on Newegg ( http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819115095 ). Pair it with the most expensive LGA 1155 motherboard they have at $339 ( http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813131760 ), and you're paying $708. Do you mean to tell me that you can get an equivalently powerful AMD processor, with a motherboard with similar features, for less than $210?
Now what if I were to tell you that you can get a motherboard that ticks all the same boxes as the other one, for $129? ( http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813157271 ). That brings the total cost down to $498. Could you please enlighten me on how it is possible to *save* $500 by building an AMD solution instead of Intel, when the Intel option is less than $500, at retail ?
The only consumers spending over $1000 on a CPU are the folks with too much money and not enough brains. And while you can spend that much on an extreme edition 6-core Intel processor, you're forgetting that it's also overclockable, by about 30%, and that you'd really be pushing things if you tried to get an FX6 running stably at 4.5GHz. You'd also be forgetting that unless something is massively parallel, the i7 still retains a performance edge over the bulldozer architecture. Chiefly, though, you'd be forgetting that for 99% of what you do, you'll never see the difference between the i7 2700 and the FX6, except perhaps that the ability to use a small SSD as a cache drive to improve spinny platter drive performance, something that's built into the Intel Z68 motherboard chipset and, at least last I checked, didn't exist on the AMD platform, would actually give the i7 a boost in real world usage, for significantly less price (pair a 32GB SSD with a 3TB spinny platter drive, and you get the write speed of the SSD, coupled with the capacity of the spinny platter drive). You may see a performance increase in things like video encoding, depending on the software you're using, but it's not going to get you any more frames per second in Skyrim. And truthfully? When I rip a DVD, I queue up the transcode in Handbrake before I go to bed, set it to turn the computer off when it's done, and don't really care if it finishes 2 minutes earlier.
I just think it's 50 cents off a $15 purchase I never would have made. I still don't want to spend the $14.50. It's like buying stuff in a grocery store just because it's on sale, I won't buy something I don't need just because the price is lower. That's idiotic.
That's the wrong way to use coupons/sales. And yes, it is idiotic. But there is a reason that many *wealthy* families use coupons: used properly, they can cut down on your cost of living by a significant amount.
Case in point: right now, my regular grocery store is having a sale... $3.99/lb for beef roasts, or about half of the normal cost for this particular cut. A large roast will still cost you $25 or more, but that is half the cost, and it's something you may buy anyway. They also currently have pork tenderloin on sale, and another grocery store I visit regularly has chicken legs on sale (great for making soup, and as a soup, it isn't adversely affected by freezing for a month or two until needed). By adjusting my habits to buy food that's on sale, I can save large amounts of money over time. And since I have to buy *something*, why wouldn't I buy the cut of meat that's on sale for half off? And to carry it further, if I have the freezer space, and am more concerned with cost than quality, why wouldn't I buy large amounts when it's on sale and freeze it? I know people who never pay full price for food, and when your food budget could be higher than your rent budget (try having a family with 2 adults and 4 teenagers, some time), that's a substantial savings.
The argument could be made that this is already the case, with "expendable" soldiers acting as the avatars for politicians or other unscrupulous sorts.
To a certain extent, yes. But human lives still have value, if not to the politicians, to the military leaders calling the shots, and to the people who have to read about it in the paper.
Consider: a little shy of 4,500 US soldiers have died in Iraq since hostilities began in 2003, and nearly 33,000 have been wounded. Stalin wrote that 1,000 deaths is a tragedy, 1,000,000 is a statistic, and the same holds true for this conflict: 4,500 dead is a *lot*, but it's a number most of us can wrap our heads around, and relate to. Quite aside from the human face that we see in the media, we can understand what 4,500 dead men and women means. Now consider that instead of 4,500 dead soldiers and 33,000 wounded, we have robots destroyed, or damaged but repairable. The folks sitting in a bunker controlling the robots, however, are unharmed. Finally consider: the US estimates that it costs about $150,000 to train a soldier. If we give these robots a unit cost equivalent to a cruise missile, at about $125,000 each. Now, not only is it cheaper to lose a robot, but there's no human face on the losses, and we no longer see the mothers of slain soldiers confronting the president on the evening news.
Those declaring war don't have to pay the ultimate cost, but there is a human cost that they have to deal with. If you remove that human cost, they are more likely to go to war. This cannot end well: the best possible scenario is that your enemy also has semi-autonomous robots controlled by telepresence, at which point who wins becomes a question of who throws the most money at the battlefield. And if that's going to be the case, why do we need this? We can already wage economic wars, and in fact, are already waging several.
If we reduce the relative risk of going to war, we remove the reasons not to. "Worth" takes on a whole new meaning, when you don't have as much to lose.
How is making a movie and R&D'ing a technology Apples to Apples enough for this to be worthy of so many question marks?
No. But in this case, the difference is enough to warrant the question marks: it *should* cost a lot less to simply develop a mockup of how something should work than to actually build that tool.
Now, Avatar did involve developing a few new technologies for the entertainment industry, but the point stands: if Avatar cost a quarter of a billion dollars to make, actually building the technology that Avatar is describing should cost more, shouldn't it? $7 million is a teacup in the ocean.
That being said, I don't think that TFA is talking about mind-machine interface, it's talking about telepresence. There's a world of difference between them, in that telepresence has already been done, and is being done on a semi-regular basis. It'll be a *lot* cheaper to build a bipedal robot that's controlled by telepresence than it would be to build one that's controlled by MMI.
Try Bodhi Linux... they're a minimalist Ubu derivative, and e17 is the only officially supported DE. It's based on LTS, so as of this writing, some of the stuff might be a little outdated, but they maintain their own versions of a *lot* of software, in their own repos, so it is mostly up to date (and it's pretty much on the bleeding edge when it comes to E builds, with a new one usually every couple of weeks... the lead developer is very much in contact with the e17 developers, and is keeping it up to date). It still ties in to Ubuntu's repos, though, so anything that's in Ubu's repos will work on Bodhi, too, and they have software packs available for anybody who wants to have the "everything including the kitchen sink" set up that Ubuntu seems to prefer in their distro.
http://bodhilinux.com/
e17 has that. It's part of the "composite" module. Load it, and set up a binding to launch the pager... perhaps different names for it, but essentially the same effect. I have mine set up with edge bindings on the screen... I put the mouse in the bottom right, it launches the "scale pager", which is essentially an expo-like desktop switcher. I put it in the top left, it launches scale for all windows on the current desktop, and bottom left is bound to scale for all desktops.
Surprisingly light on resources, too. Despite having the desktop compositor loaded, as well as a calendar widget, a clock widget, and a few other desktop blingy things, enlightenment itself is only using 49MB of RAM on my system as I type this. And there's some truly beautiful themes in existence for it, giving it the potential to be an absolutely gorgeous system, while still being very easy and intuitive to work with.
There's even a few distros built around e17 as their core offering... my personal favourite (and the distro this laptop has installed) is Bodhi Linux (http://bodhilinux.com)
e17 would be my desktop of choice... entirely modular, so if you just want a basic window manager with nothing else, you can have that, but if you prefer a full blown desktop environment, you can have that, too. What I have mine set up as is somewhere in between... I guess you could call it a desktop environment, in that there is a sort of taskbar/launcher thing and I have a clock and calendar widget loaded, and I have compositing effects turned on, but it's a far cry from what you see from Gnome or KDE these days... even XFCE is getting too bloated for my liking, and it was never as pretty as e17 can be. And it's very light on system resources, too, in part because it's modular and you only need to load the modules you actually use... I've seen it shoehorned in to less than 40MB of RAM quite easily... on the system I'm typing this on right now, enlightenment is using 49MB of RAM, and that's with multiple widgets and compositing effects turned on that don't need to be.
Ultimately, though, it's a question of what works for you. If Fluxbox is to your liking, then awesome. It can be quite nice, too.
Never heard of Shahidka, have you?
What they need to do is keep track of who gets scanned, and anybody who scans an unacceptable proportion of one gender versus the other gets fired, no compromises. (exactly 50/50 is probably not possible, but make the maximum acceptable ratio something like 48/52, proportionally adjusted to the population on the plane in question). Failing that, set up some kind of pattern for who gets scanned, like a fibonnacci sequence or something. And install video cameras in the screening room, angled so that you cannot see the display, but you can see anything pointed at the display (say viewing from 180 degrees). Put that camera on a live feed so that the passengers waiting in line can see it.
That also shows that AV software is, at best, a temporary measure. IMO the future is better OS security (and here MS is to blame), better application security (which is a budgetary and an education/knowledge problem).
So.... you're suggesting that the iOS method is the way to go?
As long as it's possible for users to run things with administrative privileges, viruses will have a way in through social engineering. And as long as it's possible to install stuff from vendors other than the OS manufacturer, there will be programs which think they need to run as admin, and users who let them. And the only way to get around that problem is to run a completely closed system, where users don't need to install drivers at all, and where they don't have any rights to run anything with administrative privileges. Even then, virus writers will find a way to harm you, and while it will no longer bring down the system, most virus writers don't want to bring down the system, they want to leave you with a usable system and steal some of your resources.
The sad reality is that AV is needed. It's never going to be a perfect solution, because the virus creators will always find new ways to do what they want to do. But it will still be needed, no matter how heavily you lock down the system.
39% support, of the people that voted. :) When you multiply that by the 65% or so that actually turned up at the polls, that translates to about 25% support. (don't feel like doing the math for the exact numbers)
To add to your suspicions... the blog in question is not one I've ever heard of. Now, I make no claims about being any sort of authority on the entire content of the Internet, but the first question that occurred to me on reading the summary was "does anybody here follow the blog in question, and if so, does it actually advocate piracy or promote the theft of property in any way?"
UK police are... special... at times. But they're not stupid. They wouldn't make a move against a website unless that website was actually doing something illegal. Coupled with your own information, I am now asking "is this an attempt to raise the profile of the blog, so that a few days from now when they are 'proven innocent', they'll have more hits?"
Considering that Samsung currently owns 95% of the OLED display market, it's not surprising that he'd say that. Picture quality (and thinness) is going to be the primary driver for OLED replacing LCD in the TV and monitor markets.
I disagree... OLED having a significantly better picture quality will make a difference for some people, yes. Early adopters. What will make the difference is when they start being cheaper than LCD's, for the majority of the market. Even then, it'll still take a while for OLED's to completely supplant LCD's, because of attrition.
My computer monitor is an OLED display. It was very expensive, but it *does* have a very high quality picture. I will not, however, be replacing my TV until I need to take it out and shoot it. It's a 4-year old LG 42" 1080p display, and has 2 component video inputs, 3 HDMI, a VGA, and a DVI. I don't need any more than that, and the picture is plenty good enough for the type of content I watch.
Enthusiasts will want the best possible picture quality. Casual TV watchers don't care, as long as it works. Heck, I *support* an IPTV service for work, and we still have customers watching on 13" CRT displays with coax only for the input.