The Surface RT *could* be a good product. Target it at the enterprise, not consumer, market. Make it join to Windows domains. Put Outlook and basic Office apps on it - you don't need the full 100% MS Office, but basic functionality needs to work (and with no weird licensing crap). Make it play nice with all your other Windows stuff - homegroups, media player, everything. Hell, make it work with the Xbox if you can find something useful to do. And steal Apple's motto - make it "just work".
Sell an "app builder" that lets you make a custom build of IE, bug-compatible with any version you choose back to IE6, that limits the browser to a specific site (subdomain or even path), and with hard-coded security settings, so businesses can use whatever custom software they've built.
Finally, make it cheap. Microsoft doesn't need to pay the Microsoft tax. Build a mediocre tablet, but sell it at crap-tablet prices. The price should be in the $300 range, not $600 or $1000. Corporations don't have *that* much cash to throw around.
PS: You know what Microsoft needs to do? Cheat. Android is open-source. Build an emulator to run Android apps on Windows RT. This means that, at the very worst, the Surface RT becomes a mediocre Android tablet, and those still sell better than the current Surface RT. Google will fight this - you probably won't get to claim Android compatibility, definitely not include Google apps like GMail or the Play store - but it can be good enough to help you.
I would have thought that standard peer review would have caught this - someone reading this, specifically with an eye towards accuracy, should have noticed it well before it made it to print. Whether that would result in just removing the offending text (which, while not completely guilty, definitely sounds bad) or result in actual correction of the experiment, I can't say.
I actual used the "Show Passwords" feature quite frequently. Certain sites seem to like blocking auto-complete of username and password fields (mainly banks, I've found). These sites also tend to have the most archaic password policies, where my standard password (which I append with a site-specific suffix, as per recommended security practice) cannot be used because it contains non-alphanumeric characters.
So it's a password I cannot remember, and while Firefox remembers the password it is being blocked from filling it out for me. I used to go in, look up the password, and copy-paste it in. Now I've moved away from it (found a JS bookmarklet that forces autocomplete on), but I still remember exactly how to do it. And you know what? It has to be more secure than constantly resetting the password and getting it emailed to me.
You know what's worse? I actually tried to have three-tiered passwords. A simple one used for places where it can be compromised without impacting me, a more complex one for standard usage, and a fiendishly-complex one I was going to use for the most important things: root logins to servers and banking passwords. Sadly, my twenty-plus-character, mixed-case-with-numbers-and-symbols non-dictionary superpassword is rejected by every bank I've ever used, so all it's securing right now is direct root access to my BSD box.
Not only does it have some areas of pretty high population density, but California is also pretty large just in terms of area.
Honestly, I think the US needs some reorganization. Split the larger states into parts, and merge up all the small ones (Rhode Island, Connecticut and Massachusetts). Try to get every state to around 6-7 million people - right now state populations cover nearly two orders of magnitude, from 600K to 38M. There will be some weirdness - I believe that will require New York City to be not just its own state, but three different states, due to having 19M people. Some cases can't really be avoided, due to geography - Hawaii has only 1.4M people, but merging it with another state is just ludicrous.
Actually, other than the solar panels, this is a completely plausible machine. Ultracheap 13" 1366x768 display? Check. Ultracheap, low-power Atom? Check. Less RAM than my laptop from five years ago? Check. Cheap disk drive, not pricey flash? Check.
And don't forget, they're probably getting some subsidies, just like the other "cheap computer for the Third World" projects.
TFA doesn't seem to mention it by name, but it sounds like this is an attempt to build a computer based on rapid single flux quantum principles.
Basically, you replace transistors with things called "Josephson junctions", and use short (picosecond-range) bursts of electricity instead of continuous DC current. Josephson junctions are a quantum phenomenon that happens in superconductors, hence the Q in RSFQ, but the computation itself is traditional logic, not quantum weirdness. That's why it needs to be cryogenic - we don't have room-temperature superconductors.
The main benefit is that Josephson junctions are extremely fast - a 2005 study by the NSA (apparently not classified) planned an initial test computer at 50GHz, boosting to 250GHz by 2010. This seems to be referenced obliquely in TFA, which mentions 100GHz clockspeeds. They're also very power-efficient - the bursts of electricity can be absolutely tiny, since it's working in a superconductor.
The 2005 paper seemed to go nowhere - there are a lot of issues to sort out, from "how do we make RAM for this thing?" to "how do we make power cables that run at these temperatures?". But I've suspected that they secretly continued development, and had functional RSFQ computers, since it's actually a pretty neat idea and the price tag in the paper was pretty low ($46M).
*Winner of the "funniest concept of the day" award.
I just envisioned a American Revolutionary War-era blunderbuss, covered in Picatinny rails, with a red-dot sight, pistol foregrip, underbarrel grenade launcher, and all the other tacticool COD-gun bullshit. It's a funny enough mental image that I might try to photoshop it together.
That's the standard warranty period on SSDs. SSDs often get much more written to them (dozens of gigabytes per day, in some cases), so they can run through their limited endurance much faster, even though they generally use more-durable MLC instead of TLC. With care, they can last much longer, but if you're using them as swap or something, it can run out after a year or two.
Many "real nerds" would build an HTPC rather than run a cable from one of their current PCs, since that gives them an excuse to buy new hardware to play with.
It's standard practice, when publishing about security flaws, to alert the producer of the products affected before doing so openly, only publishing when a) the hole is patched, or b) if they are ignoring the issue and refusing (or at least taking too long) to fix it.
If they have not given the manufacturer a reasonable amount of time to fix the problem, I can understand why they're being censored - it's unnecessarily dangerous. However, if this is simply the manufacturer trying even harder to pretend the problem doesn't exist, I would of course object strenuously, and support publishing the hole because that will not only force them to get a fix out ASAP, but will punish them for taking so long.
And, while TFA doesn't say either way on the issue, I would expect the latter, not the former.
I know most of us probably haven't taken a good, long look at the night sky. Most because of light pollution, or from just not bothering to look up.
I've seen planets before. With the naked eye, you know what they look like? Little dots of light, about the size of a star, or a high-altitude aircraft. Saturn is the farthest planet that can be seen with the naked eye, and also the hardest.
Without a telescope, you don't see the rings. Or much else - it's a dot in the sky, like the billions and billions of other dots in the sky. The only easy way to tell the difference between planets and aircraft, from the ground with the naked eye, is by movement - planets move far, far slower. Unless, of course, the aircraft is circling, or even just of a type that can hover (either a aerostat, or a helicopter design).
So yeah, I can totally believe that a squad of soldiers, most of whom were likely born in cities and never grew up with a good view of the night sky, and none of whom are trained astronomers, would find Saturn suspicious enough to report as an "unidentified object".
And, contrary to the headlines, they didn't "mistake it for a drone". A team of military observers observed something, made some requests to see if it was something benign, or a potential threat. The scientists sent back some requests for better information, just to be sure (after all, placing a drone around where a planet would be sounds like a decent idea for camouflage), then reported back "yep, that's Saturn".
Same goes for Venus. Easy to see in the night sky, sometimes even in the day, but not easy to identify unless you were specifically looking for planets. It's commonly seen, but misidentified - our own President Carter did so, for instance.
Planets also *move*. They're not in fixed positions from night to night - they move through the sky. So it's not like spotting constellations, where you just need a point of reference. Knowing where those planets will be takes some pretty complex calculations - figuring out how to do that drove many advances in math.
So yeah. Stop acting like they're morons for not instantly recognizing a planet. I'd wager money that you all wouldn't even spot them in the sky, much less know exactly what they are.
Crysis never really was a "needs a beast rig to run" game. I played it on a low-end gaming laptop a year or so after it came out, on medium settings. The difficulty is mainly in maxing it out, at high resolutions. You still need a massive system to max it out at 2560x1440, or at 5760x1080. It's a game that starts at a moderately low load for minimum settings, but continues to benefit from performance increases until you reach a *very* high level.
If I were in charge, and the agency responsible for technological espionage and information security told me they couldn't search through their own emails, I would fire them. Every single one of them. Bam. Agency dissolved, someone go think of a new TLA for the new agency. This is like a Navy that can't figure out how to dock a battleship, or a tax agency that doesn't know what all the valid exemptions are. Complete and utter incompetence.
What's saddest is that this almost certainly isn't true. They've got these capabilities. They're just trying to hide something ("everything" qualifies as something, for their purposes). *Maybe* they're telling the truth, if they've got some custom, highly-encrypted system where emails can only be decrypted by the users. But that doesn't seem like the phrasing used here.
What's saddest is that "we're completely fucking incompetent" is not just the excuse they went with, but that it actually works.
"Malware" is a superset of viruses, worms, trojans, and pretty much any software that inflicts harm. It can spread either through the network, over physical media, through social engineering, or any combination of the three.
Valve also ported pretty much all of their games to Linux. And quite a few other games have followed - 247 as of this moment.
Sure, that's not many compared to the number on Steam (can't find a total right now, but I recall it being above 2500 a few years ago). And most of them are small, indie games - the only big, AAA titles on there are Valve games.
But these things take time. It's a step - several steps - in the right direction, but it's a long journey.
Well, let's look at the use cases for OpenCL right now: * Scientific computing, at levels from workstations to supercomputers * Games that need to offload stuff too parallel for the CPU to handle, or for code that needs to run on the GPU as the output will be used by other GPU code (streaming texture decompression is a common task). * Video transcoders, encoders and decoders * Bitcoin miners (obligatory Bitcoin reference: check!)
All of those are fields where performance is a very high priority - in some cases, above even correctness. They're also fields for experts - if you don't know how to program at essentially the assembly level, you won't make it in the field. So is it harder? Sure. But this is stuff where you can't just wave a magic wand and make it easy - it's tough because massively multi-threaded programming is intrinsically difficult.
They're essentially at parity because they're matching, for the most part, the features of the underlying hardware. It's a weird give-and-take - Microsoft likes to dictate features, but their DirectX team is smart enough (now) to dictate features that at least one of the GPU companies is already implementing - essentially, they ask Nvidia what they're adding, ask AMD what they're adding, then add both of them to Direct3D and tell them both to implement it (and since they're both watching each other's moves anyways, this doesn't really change much). OpenGL takes a less leading role in adding features - they're usually added first as a vendor-specific extension (meaning Nvidia gets to dictate how it works and is used, and the extension has their name as a prefix). Then they standardize it as an ARB (Architecture Review Board) extension - make it more generic, less designed for one specific piece of hardware, and thus much easier for others to implement. Finally, if it's becoming a standard feature, they'll add it to the core language. OpenGL takes a more leading role in obsoleting older functionality, or in designing the OpenGL ES variants of the language. But they leave the cutting edge to the hardware people.
So that's why OpenGL "trails" Direct3D by a hair - they follow the hardware a bit less closely. But they're both close enough that they're essentially feature-compatible, for modern stuff (this is all completely wrong for OpenGL 2.0 / DirectX 8 or lower).
Except that "light pollution" isn't pollution by definition
Now we're arguing definitions. It's unwanted and potentially harmful. It's not pollution in the way that dumping oil in a river or uranium in a field is, but it's pollution in the way that noise pollution is.
In any case, "light pollution" as a two-word phrase is a noun with a clearly-defined definition. Whether "light pollution"(noun) is the same as "light"(adjective) "pollution"(noun) is irrelevant.
the safety benefits of illumination in cities far outweighs any potential inconvenience to astronomers.
Really? Because I've seen studies that show an excess of illumination is in fact harmful to safety, through two mechanisms. First, with high ambient light and bright headlights, you can get temporarily blinded by the light. Secondly, that brightness cannot cover all areas you need to see for driving - I'm talking mainly about pedestrians, who can easily be in shadows until it's too late. Having less light would counter-intuitively be safer, because then your eyes can adapt to the darkness and be able to see them.
I could, if I cared, pull up citations for all of this, but since you're arguing with no such references, I can't see why I should be assed to, either.
Actually, I think Moscow has a better claim to it.
As we all know, the Roman empire was split circa 400AD (1100AUC). The Eastern portion became the Byzantine Empire, which lasted essentially until 1200AD. By that point the Byzantine Empire was heavily connected to Eastern Orthodoxy, and in that role, at least, the Empire was succeeded by the Russians (Mehmed II, the Ottoman conqueror of Byzantium/Constantinople, tried to claim the title as well, but that didn't last much beyond his lifetime). Tsarist Russia fell to the Bolsheviks, who formed the Russian SFSR, which joined the USSR. When that eventually collapsed, we ended up with the Russian Federation we have today.
As for the Western half, that also ended up in Russia. The title laid dormant for a few centuries after the fall of Rome, until it was revived for Charlemagne and the Holy Roman Empire. That also eventually fell apart, until Otto the Great. While this territory never included Rome itself, it did include parts of Italy. In any case, the Empire was formally dissolved during the Napoleonic wars; however, both Austrians and Germans laid claim to being its successor state. In either case, those states ended up wrapped within Nazi Germany, which was conquered mostly by the Soviets in WW2.
So yep. All hail Caesar Putin I, Emperor of the Roman Empire (I think we're up to the Fourth or maybe Fifth Roman Empire by now, but I'll let him decide what he wants to call it).
You don't even have to look at undeveloped regions to see that "expensive generator" can be cheaper than "grid hookup + cheap generator".
I live in a fairly big American city. A state capital, even. Pretty far from a third-world country (or whatever Peru is - the term seems to be pretty vague, I'm probably using it wrong).
Just yesterday, one of the never-ending road crews installed some pedestrian crossing lights across a road I travel every day to get to work. And guess what? There's little solar panels to power them, because that's cheaper than digging up the road (for a third time) to get a grid hookup.
So if it can be too expensive to build the grid out another ten feet, I have zero problem imagining that building it out several miles in extremely mountainous terrain would be too expensive as well.
Several of the public schools around me have gotten new robocall systems, meant to be used to mass-alert all parents when something happens. School closings, emergencies, stuff like that.
Naturally, the school principals have been quick to send out mass calls for anything, up to and including announcing dates for sporting events. I hear quite a bit of grumbling from people about this.
Basically, if you give anyone a way to easily send a message to a large number of people, they will find an excuse to use it. Hell, we saw that with spam - it was so easy to send emails by the thousands that we had to pass laws against it, and we *still* haven't solved the problem.
That's what happened here. Someone found an excuse to use their shiny toy and feel important, and they used it, despite the fact that a) the circumstances did not really justify such a response, and b) the message sent was not even good at solving the problem.
It's about ease of vocal communication. I could tell you that I'm at 31.415926N 54.589793W, or I could tell you that I'm at signal.shot.fleet. Which would be easier to send over a voice channel?
Basically, it's the same reason you went to slashdot.org, not to 216.34.181.45. Words are easier than numbers for people to use.
Slashdot Mirror
The Surface RT *could* be a good product. Target it at the enterprise, not consumer, market. Make it join to Windows domains. Put Outlook and basic Office apps on it - you don't need the full 100% MS Office, but basic functionality needs to work (and with no weird licensing crap). Make it play nice with all your other Windows stuff - homegroups, media player, everything. Hell, make it work with the Xbox if you can find something useful to do. And steal Apple's motto - make it "just work".
Sell an "app builder" that lets you make a custom build of IE, bug-compatible with any version you choose back to IE6, that limits the browser to a specific site (subdomain or even path), and with hard-coded security settings, so businesses can use whatever custom software they've built.
Finally, make it cheap. Microsoft doesn't need to pay the Microsoft tax. Build a mediocre tablet, but sell it at crap-tablet prices. The price should be in the $300 range, not $600 or $1000. Corporations don't have *that* much cash to throw around.
PS: You know what Microsoft needs to do? Cheat. Android is open-source. Build an emulator to run Android apps on Windows RT. This means that, at the very worst, the Surface RT becomes a mediocre Android tablet, and those still sell better than the current Surface RT. Google will fight this - you probably won't get to claim Android compatibility, definitely not include Google apps like GMail or the Play store - but it can be good enough to help you.
Ah, true. Can't blame peer review for only skimming the appendices.
Now, the journal editors, them I think we can blame.
I would have thought that standard peer review would have caught this - someone reading this, specifically with an eye towards accuracy, should have noticed it well before it made it to print. Whether that would result in just removing the offending text (which, while not completely guilty, definitely sounds bad) or result in actual correction of the experiment, I can't say.
I actual used the "Show Passwords" feature quite frequently. Certain sites seem to like blocking auto-complete of username and password fields (mainly banks, I've found). These sites also tend to have the most archaic password policies, where my standard password (which I append with a site-specific suffix, as per recommended security practice) cannot be used because it contains non-alphanumeric characters.
So it's a password I cannot remember, and while Firefox remembers the password it is being blocked from filling it out for me. I used to go in, look up the password, and copy-paste it in. Now I've moved away from it (found a JS bookmarklet that forces autocomplete on), but I still remember exactly how to do it. And you know what? It has to be more secure than constantly resetting the password and getting it emailed to me.
You know what's worse? I actually tried to have three-tiered passwords. A simple one used for places where it can be compromised without impacting me, a more complex one for standard usage, and a fiendishly-complex one I was going to use for the most important things: root logins to servers and banking passwords. Sadly, my twenty-plus-character, mixed-case-with-numbers-and-symbols non-dictionary superpassword is rejected by every bank I've ever used, so all it's securing right now is direct root access to my BSD box.
Not only does it have some areas of pretty high population density, but California is also pretty large just in terms of area.
Honestly, I think the US needs some reorganization. Split the larger states into parts, and merge up all the small ones (Rhode Island, Connecticut and Massachusetts). Try to get every state to around 6-7 million people - right now state populations cover nearly two orders of magnitude, from 600K to 38M. There will be some weirdness - I believe that will require New York City to be not just its own state, but three different states, due to having 19M people. Some cases can't really be avoided, due to geography - Hawaii has only 1.4M people, but merging it with another state is just ludicrous.
Actually, other than the solar panels, this is a completely plausible machine. Ultracheap 13" 1366x768 display? Check. Ultracheap, low-power Atom? Check. Less RAM than my laptop from five years ago? Check. Cheap disk drive, not pricey flash? Check.
And don't forget, they're probably getting some subsidies, just like the other "cheap computer for the Third World" projects.
TFA doesn't seem to mention it by name, but it sounds like this is an attempt to build a computer based on rapid single flux quantum principles.
Basically, you replace transistors with things called "Josephson junctions", and use short (picosecond-range) bursts of electricity instead of continuous DC current. Josephson junctions are a quantum phenomenon that happens in superconductors, hence the Q in RSFQ, but the computation itself is traditional logic, not quantum weirdness. That's why it needs to be cryogenic - we don't have room-temperature superconductors.
The main benefit is that Josephson junctions are extremely fast - a 2005 study by the NSA (apparently not classified) planned an initial test computer at 50GHz, boosting to 250GHz by 2010. This seems to be referenced obliquely in TFA, which mentions 100GHz clockspeeds. They're also very power-efficient - the bursts of electricity can be absolutely tiny, since it's working in a superconductor.
The 2005 paper seemed to go nowhere - there are a lot of issues to sort out, from "how do we make RAM for this thing?" to "how do we make power cables that run at these temperatures?". But I've suspected that they secretly continued development, and had functional RSFQ computers, since it's actually a pretty neat idea and the price tag in the paper was pretty low ($46M).
assault muzzle-loaders*
*Winner of the "funniest concept of the day" award.
I just envisioned a American Revolutionary War-era blunderbuss, covered in Picatinny rails, with a red-dot sight, pistol foregrip, underbarrel grenade launcher, and all the other tacticool COD-gun bullshit. It's a funny enough mental image that I might try to photoshop it together.
That's the standard warranty period on SSDs. SSDs often get much more written to them (dozens of gigabytes per day, in some cases), so they can run through their limited endurance much faster, even though they generally use more-durable MLC instead of TLC. With care, they can last much longer, but if you're using them as swap or something, it can run out after a year or two.
Many "real nerds" would build an HTPC rather than run a cable from one of their current PCs, since that gives them an excuse to buy new hardware to play with.
It's standard practice, when publishing about security flaws, to alert the producer of the products affected before doing so openly, only publishing when a) the hole is patched, or b) if they are ignoring the issue and refusing (or at least taking too long) to fix it.
If they have not given the manufacturer a reasonable amount of time to fix the problem, I can understand why they're being censored - it's unnecessarily dangerous. However, if this is simply the manufacturer trying even harder to pretend the problem doesn't exist, I would of course object strenuously, and support publishing the hole because that will not only force them to get a fix out ASAP, but will punish them for taking so long.
And, while TFA doesn't say either way on the issue, I would expect the latter, not the former.
I know most of us probably haven't taken a good, long look at the night sky. Most because of light pollution, or from just not bothering to look up.
I've seen planets before. With the naked eye, you know what they look like? Little dots of light, about the size of a star, or a high-altitude aircraft. Saturn is the farthest planet that can be seen with the naked eye, and also the hardest.
Without a telescope, you don't see the rings. Or much else - it's a dot in the sky, like the billions and billions of other dots in the sky. The only easy way to tell the difference between planets and aircraft, from the ground with the naked eye, is by movement - planets move far, far slower. Unless, of course, the aircraft is circling, or even just of a type that can hover (either a aerostat, or a helicopter design).
So yeah, I can totally believe that a squad of soldiers, most of whom were likely born in cities and never grew up with a good view of the night sky, and none of whom are trained astronomers, would find Saturn suspicious enough to report as an "unidentified object".
And, contrary to the headlines, they didn't "mistake it for a drone". A team of military observers observed something, made some requests to see if it was something benign, or a potential threat. The scientists sent back some requests for better information, just to be sure (after all, placing a drone around where a planet would be sounds like a decent idea for camouflage), then reported back "yep, that's Saturn".
Same goes for Venus. Easy to see in the night sky, sometimes even in the day, but not easy to identify unless you were specifically looking for planets. It's commonly seen, but misidentified - our own President Carter did so, for instance.
Planets also *move*. They're not in fixed positions from night to night - they move through the sky. So it's not like spotting constellations, where you just need a point of reference. Knowing where those planets will be takes some pretty complex calculations - figuring out how to do that drove many advances in math.
So yeah. Stop acting like they're morons for not instantly recognizing a planet. I'd wager money that you all wouldn't even spot them in the sky, much less know exactly what they are.
You're a foodie.
There, now there's a foodie that's not self-described. You're welcome.
Yes, but at 40fps, 1024x768, and low detail settings.
Crysis never really was a "needs a beast rig to run" game. I played it on a low-end gaming laptop a year or so after it came out, on medium settings. The difficulty is mainly in maxing it out, at high resolutions. You still need a massive system to max it out at 2560x1440, or at 5760x1080. It's a game that starts at a moderately low load for minimum settings, but continues to benefit from performance increases until you reach a *very* high level.
If I were in charge, and the agency responsible for technological espionage and information security told me they couldn't search through their own emails, I would fire them. Every single one of them. Bam. Agency dissolved, someone go think of a new TLA for the new agency. This is like a Navy that can't figure out how to dock a battleship, or a tax agency that doesn't know what all the valid exemptions are. Complete and utter incompetence.
What's saddest is that this almost certainly isn't true. They've got these capabilities. They're just trying to hide something ("everything" qualifies as something, for their purposes). *Maybe* they're telling the truth, if they've got some custom, highly-encrypted system where emails can only be decrypted by the users. But that doesn't seem like the phrasing used here.
What's saddest is that "we're completely fucking incompetent" is not just the excuse they went with, but that it actually works.
You've got your definitions wrong.
"Malware" is a superset of viruses, worms, trojans, and pretty much any software that inflicts harm. It can spread either through the network, over physical media, through social engineering, or any combination of the three.
Valve also ported pretty much all of their games to Linux. And quite a few other games have followed - 247 as of this moment.
Sure, that's not many compared to the number on Steam (can't find a total right now, but I recall it being above 2500 a few years ago). And most of them are small, indie games - the only big, AAA titles on there are Valve games.
But these things take time. It's a step - several steps - in the right direction, but it's a long journey.
You haven't been taking your iodine, have you?
Well, let's look at the use cases for OpenCL right now:
* Scientific computing, at levels from workstations to supercomputers
* Games that need to offload stuff too parallel for the CPU to handle, or for code that needs to run on the GPU as the output will be used by other GPU code (streaming texture decompression is a common task).
* Video transcoders, encoders and decoders
* Bitcoin miners (obligatory Bitcoin reference: check!)
All of those are fields where performance is a very high priority - in some cases, above even correctness. They're also fields for experts - if you don't know how to program at essentially the assembly level, you won't make it in the field. So is it harder? Sure. But this is stuff where you can't just wave a magic wand and make it easy - it's tough because massively multi-threaded programming is intrinsically difficult.
They're essentially at parity because they're matching, for the most part, the features of the underlying hardware. It's a weird give-and-take - Microsoft likes to dictate features, but their DirectX team is smart enough (now) to dictate features that at least one of the GPU companies is already implementing - essentially, they ask Nvidia what they're adding, ask AMD what they're adding, then add both of them to Direct3D and tell them both to implement it (and since they're both watching each other's moves anyways, this doesn't really change much). OpenGL takes a less leading role in adding features - they're usually added first as a vendor-specific extension (meaning Nvidia gets to dictate how it works and is used, and the extension has their name as a prefix). Then they standardize it as an ARB (Architecture Review Board) extension - make it more generic, less designed for one specific piece of hardware, and thus much easier for others to implement. Finally, if it's becoming a standard feature, they'll add it to the core language. OpenGL takes a more leading role in obsoleting older functionality, or in designing the OpenGL ES variants of the language. But they leave the cutting edge to the hardware people.
So that's why OpenGL "trails" Direct3D by a hair - they follow the hardware a bit less closely. But they're both close enough that they're essentially feature-compatible, for modern stuff (this is all completely wrong for OpenGL 2.0 / DirectX 8 or lower).
Except that "light pollution" isn't pollution by definition
Now we're arguing definitions. It's unwanted and potentially harmful. It's not pollution in the way that dumping oil in a river or uranium in a field is, but it's pollution in the way that noise pollution is.
In any case, "light pollution" as a two-word phrase is a noun with a clearly-defined definition. Whether "light pollution"(noun) is the same as "light"(adjective) "pollution"(noun) is irrelevant.
the safety benefits of illumination in cities far outweighs any potential inconvenience to astronomers.
Really? Because I've seen studies that show an excess of illumination is in fact harmful to safety, through two mechanisms. First, with high ambient light and bright headlights, you can get temporarily blinded by the light. Secondly, that brightness cannot cover all areas you need to see for driving - I'm talking mainly about pedestrians, who can easily be in shadows until it's too late. Having less light would counter-intuitively be safer, because then your eyes can adapt to the darkness and be able to see them.
I could, if I cared, pull up citations for all of this, but since you're arguing with no such references, I can't see why I should be assed to, either.
Actually, I think Moscow has a better claim to it.
As we all know, the Roman empire was split circa 400AD (1100AUC). The Eastern portion became the Byzantine Empire, which lasted essentially until 1200AD. By that point the Byzantine Empire was heavily connected to Eastern Orthodoxy, and in that role, at least, the Empire was succeeded by the Russians (Mehmed II, the Ottoman conqueror of Byzantium/Constantinople, tried to claim the title as well, but that didn't last much beyond his lifetime). Tsarist Russia fell to the Bolsheviks, who formed the Russian SFSR, which joined the USSR. When that eventually collapsed, we ended up with the Russian Federation we have today.
As for the Western half, that also ended up in Russia. The title laid dormant for a few centuries after the fall of Rome, until it was revived for Charlemagne and the Holy Roman Empire. That also eventually fell apart, until Otto the Great. While this territory never included Rome itself, it did include parts of Italy. In any case, the Empire was formally dissolved during the Napoleonic wars; however, both Austrians and Germans laid claim to being its successor state. In either case, those states ended up wrapped within Nazi Germany, which was conquered mostly by the Soviets in WW2.
So yep. All hail Caesar Putin I, Emperor of the Roman Empire (I think we're up to the Fourth or maybe Fifth Roman Empire by now, but I'll let him decide what he wants to call it).
You don't even have to look at undeveloped regions to see that "expensive generator" can be cheaper than "grid hookup + cheap generator".
I live in a fairly big American city. A state capital, even. Pretty far from a third-world country (or whatever Peru is - the term seems to be pretty vague, I'm probably using it wrong).
Just yesterday, one of the never-ending road crews installed some pedestrian crossing lights across a road I travel every day to get to work. And guess what? There's little solar panels to power them, because that's cheaper than digging up the road (for a third time) to get a grid hookup.
So if it can be too expensive to build the grid out another ten feet, I have zero problem imagining that building it out several miles in extremely mountainous terrain would be too expensive as well.
Several of the public schools around me have gotten new robocall systems, meant to be used to mass-alert all parents when something happens. School closings, emergencies, stuff like that.
Naturally, the school principals have been quick to send out mass calls for anything, up to and including announcing dates for sporting events. I hear quite a bit of grumbling from people about this.
Basically, if you give anyone a way to easily send a message to a large number of people, they will find an excuse to use it. Hell, we saw that with spam - it was so easy to send emails by the thousands that we had to pass laws against it, and we *still* haven't solved the problem.
That's what happened here. Someone found an excuse to use their shiny toy and feel important, and they used it, despite the fact that a) the circumstances did not really justify such a response, and b) the message sent was not even good at solving the problem.
It's about ease of vocal communication. I could tell you that I'm at 31.415926N 54.589793W, or I could tell you that I'm at signal.shot.fleet. Which would be easier to send over a voice channel?
Basically, it's the same reason you went to slashdot.org, not to 216.34.181.45. Words are easier than numbers for people to use.