Either that, or I don't want to play like a "skilled" player, I want to play like a "having fun" player.
When I'm actually playing a "serious" match (read: LAN match with friends), I play "properly" - slice corners, use flash, all that. But when I'm just trying to shoot terrorism in the face? I don't want to do that. I just want to grab an M4 and a Deagle and shoot terrorism (in the face).
I call it a dirty tactic only because it's an "un-fun" tactic, and I call it an un-fun tactic because the gameplay elements involved are not fun (for the majority of gamers - there will always be some people who enjoy it, for any value of "it").
Since when is finding and securing an advantageous position "dirty"?
When it pisses me off, mainly.
I'm not saying it's not a valid tactic. I'm not saying you shouldn't use it in competition, or even in a regular match. But it messes up my stress-vent "shoot everyone in the face" matches, so I just play against bots.
Agreed. AMD give you 90% the power of Intel for 50% the price.
I built my parents a computer to replace the old Athlon XP. I could have gotten a Core 2 Duo, or a Phenom II X3. Guess which one I got?
I actually told them that if they want to upgrade (new Civilization game out, seems to run a bit slow), the Phenom X4 and X6 chips are dirt-cheap now. Haven't heard back from them yet.
Pro-tip: Play against bots, not other people, and at a lower difficulty than you normally would.
Don't play against people for stress-relief, because there are players who play specifically to annoy other players, either to win in a dirty way (campers) or for its own sake (trolls).
Play at a low difficulty. Normally, you *want* to hit a point that you ave to get better, have to work at it, in order to win. But when playing to vent, drop the difficulty a notch or two below that, so you don't frustrate yourself.
Also, pick the right games. I've found Unreal Tournament 2004 (especially the Mutant gamemode) and Counter-Strike are the best for stress relief. The right music helps as well - I generally go for thrash metal, Ride the Lightning, Endgame, that kind of stuff.
Failing that, you need to treat the entire system as compromised, because it probably is. Do the following: Bring a Linux live CD and an external hard drive. Boot ONLY into Linux, copy necessary files (documents, photos) over to the external hard drive. Wipe the computer and reinstall everything from scratch. EVERYTHING. DBAN is your friend here. In fact, if he needs a bigger hard drive anyways, do that - just get a completely new hard drive. Restore his data files from the backup you just made.
Yes, it's a pain, but at this point the system could contain something that anything short of this wouldn't clear out. (In fact, it's *possible* for malware to make it through even that, but AFAIK those are still just research demos, not in the wild).
Oh, don't be silly. Tinfoil won't stop the mind control rays - at least, not since all the major manufacturers were suborned by the Illuminati. No, to stop the Reptilians at the CIA from reading my mind, I use lead. It tends to flake more, but I find that it clears my mind, lets me see the TRUTH behind the LIES.
They're trying to keep people from thinking he's Batman, at least. They're trying to make him look more like, I dunno, Ant Man? Maybe one of the more pathetic villains - Penguin?
Doesn't seem to include "assassination" in the list of options.
Sure, if you just wanted to be rid of Assange, that would be easy. Snipers. Bombs. Even just a guy with a pistol.
Problem is, you have him killed in any way that looks deliberate, and he becomes a martyr. I would hope that anyone in power is smart enough to know that, but I've also learned that you can never underestimate just how stupid people can be.
Now, you could try other ways. If he was just in hiding, not causing an international incident in an embassy, you could stage a "mugging gone wrong" or even just a car accident. "Problem" eliminated, but it doesn't look like you did it. If you were really good, try to make it look like it *was* deliberate, but a plan by Ecuador from the beginning to kill him for... some reason. Has to be a good reason, obviously, but it's plausible.
But even then, he dies "fighting". It's obvious that they want to first assassinate his *character*, not the person himself. Assange the man is a nobody, a mildly egotistic anti-authoritarian who started a website almost anyone could make. The problem is Assange the concept, Assange the idea. The lone rebel trying to show the evil empires for what they really are.
That's who they need to eliminate. They started with the rape allegations. Perhaps they simply embellished what actually happened. Perhaps they twisted what was said, what was done. Perhaps they made the whole thing up. They've blurred the charges so much that I can't even tell what he's actually charged with anymore. But they did a good job of it - Assange the Idea, at least to some, is gone, replaced with Assange the Man, a man who (at worst) is a hypocritical rapist scumbag, or (at best) a regular guy who made a few mistakes on par with public intoxication.
Their next step, obviously, is to milk the "common criminal" idea for all it's worth. I don't think they'll even extradite him to the US to face some vague treason charge - that brings back discussion of the leaks, the rebel and the big bad empire. No, they'll try to avoid even mentioning that. They'll hit him with rape charges to make him scum (rape is often considered the worst crime, worse even than murder). They'll probably bring in charges like shoplifting to make him seem petty, small. Then when they've finished their show trial, they'll lock him away and try to shut him up. Only once he's in prison will they think of trying to kill him, again while avoiding martyrizing him (if it were an American prison, just staging a prison fight and shanking would be enough).
The problem with that plan is that it's not completely under our control. It could bloom out of control, causing even worse climate change in the opposite direction, and we'd have no way to stop it. And it would cause damage to the regular oceanic ecosystem even if it did work perfectly - plankton blooms already cause mass killings of fish.
And I've also heard that it may not actually sequester the CO2 all that well (much of it returning to the atmosphere), but I can't be assed to check up on that.
It plans not just for the extraction of atmospheric CO2, but the long-term storage of it. The power source is wind, so it doesn't fall into the trap of generating more CO2 than it generates.The choice of location makes sense for both the temperature and for the political neutrality. They don't list an actual cost, but it would likely be only in the tens of billions, hundreds of billions in the worst case. Which is a lot of money, yes, but not the trillions or quadrillions some plans have required. And it calls for a demonstration plant first, which would be just a few dozen million.
The only thing I see stopping it is politics. In particular, America and China. Europe seems to at least recognize the need for action, and they're willing to work together to try things. China is generally too selfish and shortsighted to worry about the environment, but you could probably convince them if you could make it somewhat-profitable for them (just have the wind turbines and such made in China, that should satisfy them).
But then it falls on to America. And you're going to need America at least not fighting this plan, because if the US decides to actively fight it, it's not happening. Period. You'd also need them to at least chip in a good chunk of the funding if you're going to do the full plan, make a serious dent in CO2. Problem is, denying the very existence global warming is a political *requirement* for half the country. They'll fight it just on principle, and I can't see the rest of the country fighting back for a project that doesn't have any immediate gains for the US specifically. While some sort of "compromise" could probably pull it off, or with luck it could be swept under the rug and never become a political issue, that's not guaranteed.
They are, actually (at least in Vista and later, and for just directories as far back as 2K), but that's irrelevant.
If you set Samba to follow symlinks, it will present it to any client applications as though it were the actual file. So even old DOS-based Windows systems can handle it.
If it is a security hole that was either place deliberately, was known to the developers but not fixed within a reasonable time frame, or was caused by severe negligence, then yes, liability would be logical. But if it is a security hole that could have slipped through a *reasonable* QA process (ie. IBM's coders, not NASA's), then no.
Examples: Program has a deliberate backdoor that allows for complete root access from any remote computer, protected only by a simple password that is the same for all installations and version. As this was deliberate, they are liable. Program has a bug where the usernames and passwords are compared only on the first three characters. As this required both massively incompetent coding, and would have been caught by any reasonable testing, they are liable. Program has one field in an obscure form that is vulnerable to SQL injection (the rest is properly secured against it). This was discovered during testing, but went unfixed for months until a major security breach was made public. As they had a reasonable amount of time to fix it but failed to do so, they are liable. Program is accidentally distributed with a test account in the defaults that grants full read-only access to the system, resulting in numerous leaks of private information. As soon as it is discovered, a notice goes out to disable this account and it is removed in the next month's updates. As it was a bug that could have slipped through a reasonable QA process, and was remedied reasonably, they are not liable.
*looks at current laptop* Core i7 3610QM *looks at wreckage of last laptop* Core 2 Duo P8400 *looks at primary desktop* dual Xeon 5150s *looks at secondary desktop* Athlon 900
Yeah, if I were going to accuse myself of fanboyism, I think I'd accuse myself of fanboying for *Intel*, not AMD. Now granted, I've got a few more AMD-based builds under my belt, but I've either given them away (the Phenom X3 build) or accidentally fried them (the old Athlon XP build).
In all honesty, though, both companies have their good and bad points. Each had at least one total bomb (Pentium IV, Bulldozer). Each has good server chips for different workloads (Opterons (even the Bulldozer ones) are good for massive number crunching, Xeons are better for general server loads). On the desktop, Intel generally skews to higher prices and higher performance, while AMD aims for half the price and powerful enough. I'll even admit that AMD's current mobile chips (Fusion) are great - a decently-powerful CPU and a decently-powerful integrated GPU, with a low power draw and low price. I almost considered getting a cheaper, smaller Fusion-based laptop and a very powerful desktop, instead of getting the powerful monster of a laptop I ended up getting. Might have been a better idea, actually, but oh well.
No, I'm not saying it's factually incorrect. I'm saying that the way they put it into the summary was misleading flamebait.
A simple logical analysis shows that the primary factor in latency is instructions-per-clock, and clock speed (core count matters as well for applications with multithreaded rendering, but those are surprisingly few). The Phenom II series was good at both. The Sandy Bridge/Ivy Bridge Intel processors are also good at both, even a bit better. Bulldozer, unfortunately, went the Pentium IV route of aiming for a high clock speed (and high core count), which backfired when they relearned what Intel learned with the Pentium IV: that does not work. And so they're left with a dud processor line, but they don't even have the market share to survive just because they're big. This analysis also shows why it was a Phenom X4, not a Phenom X6, that earned AMD's top points - the X4s could reach a higher clock speed in the same thermal envelope as the X6, and thus the highest-clocked Phenom was the X4 980, supporting my hypothesis that few applications are able to use multiple threads for rendering.
Had they been able to phrase that information in a way that didn't sound like an Intel press release, they would have been fine. But it's hard to condense that into just a few sentences without coming off as biased in one direction or another.
For years, stupid PC hardware sites have maintained that CPUs have little impact on gaming performance; all you need is a decent graphics card. That position is largely supported by FPS averages, as most GPU tests are run using the most powerful CPU to prevent the CPU from being the limiting factor, but the FPS metric doesn't tell the whole story. Examining individual frame latencies better exposes the brief moments of stuttering that can disrupt otherwise smooth gameplay. Those methods have now been used to quantify the gaming performance of 18 CPUs spanning three generations by some site that really has nothing better to do than to restate the obvious for morons. [ed: removed fanboy-baiting statements from summary]
Random idea: 3D-print the mold for the barrel, pour molten steel into mold, allow to cool, then heat the thing until the mold plastic melts, leaving behind the barrel.
That's probably not how you make a *proper* barrel (ie. you won't be winning any awards for marksmanship), but that should suffice for at least a.22LR.
Hell, if the whole "Windows" thing fails on them, they should just fall back on their Xbox/gaming division (who seem at least decently competent (and profitable)), and re-use that logo.
Now what's interesting is that that logo predates Metallica (or at least their first album) - "Kill 'em All" was released in 1983, while that Microsoft logo was dropped in 1981.
Mostly-static web server, maybe? Hook it up to a SAN for storage, let it cache in RAM or on the internal SSD. A large number of small cores would alleviate many of the problems in handling thousands of concurrent connections, and if none of the pages require intensive calculation, it could work pretty well.
The reason this is valuable is not so much that it's economical today, as that there's enough uranium in the ocean to provide all our electricity needs for millions of years.
But it might prove useful for decontamination. Perhaps the uranium-free water is more important than the water-free uranium.
It might also prove useful for countries trying to develop nuclear systems (both peaceful and military) in secret. Sure, you'd still have to use a centrifuge process to get weapons-grade stuff, but this would allow any non-landlocked country to obtain natural-state uranium.
For instance, the lock on my floppy disc holder (yes, I still have one) can be opened simply by sticking a flathead screwdriver in it and turning. I would consider that to "meet the standard that a reasonable person would regard as satisfactory" for a cheap plastic floppy holder. I would NOT consider that lock to "meet the standard that a reasonable person would regard as satisfactory" for securing a hotel room.
So it depends on how difficult it is to hack. Personally, the description makes it seem like a reasonably technical hack; the design was fairly solid, and any hack that requires disassembling the lock is not something you can do discreetly. So I would say it "meets the standard that a reasonable person would regard as satisfactory" for a hotel. But not for, say, securing a bank vault.
Ah, thanks for the warning. I have a standing policy against reading Gizmodo - I don't particularly care about the whole "buying stolen iPhone prototypes" thing, they just have horrible technical writing and are incredible Apple-biased
Only if they claim it can treat dementia. If they just claim it's a fun game that involves a lot of thinking, or even call it "brain exercises", that's not FDA jurisdiction. But if they claim it can treat dementia, then it is claiming to be a medical treatment and thus would (and, I argue, should) be regulated just as any other medical treatment. It could probably breeze through many of the certifications (it's not like video games have many drugs that they can interact with), but trying to add exceptions to the "if it claims to treat a disease, it's regulated" is a slippery slope.
Now, I do have to say that I think most things in this country are over-regulated, especially in the medical field, but that's a matter of specifics, whereas I speak here only of general principle.
Any app that claims to either itself be a cure/treatment, or which directly interfaces with a system that is (or is already subject to regulation), gets regulated. So a "game" that claims to treat dementia, or an app that interfaces with a medical records system needs to be regulated, or an app that connects to a pacemaker for diagnostics, would need regulation.
Anything that simply offers medical information or rudimentary "advice" is fine. So a WebMD-type app would need no regulation, although it could still cause liability if it's wrong to the point of causing physical harm.
Basically, replace "app" with "book" and see if it makes sense. "This book contains a list of diseases, cross-indexed by symptom. It does not need to be regulated." "This book contains the complete medical history of everyone who has ever visited this hospital. It should be subject to basic regulation regarding patient privacy." "This book allows the doctor to control an implanted medical device. It should be strictly regulated, including stringent testing and controlled distribution."
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Either that, or I don't want to play like a "skilled" player, I want to play like a "having fun" player.
When I'm actually playing a "serious" match (read: LAN match with friends), I play "properly" - slice corners, use flash, all that. But when I'm just trying to shoot terrorism in the face? I don't want to do that. I just want to grab an M4 and a Deagle and shoot terrorism (in the face).
I call it a dirty tactic only because it's an "un-fun" tactic, and I call it an un-fun tactic because the gameplay elements involved are not fun (for the majority of gamers - there will always be some people who enjoy it, for any value of "it").
Since when is finding and securing an advantageous position "dirty"?
When it pisses me off, mainly.
I'm not saying it's not a valid tactic. I'm not saying you shouldn't use it in competition, or even in a regular match. But it messes up my stress-vent "shoot everyone in the face" matches, so I just play against bots.
Agreed. AMD give you 90% the power of Intel for 50% the price.
I built my parents a computer to replace the old Athlon XP. I could have gotten a Core 2 Duo, or a Phenom II X3. Guess which one I got?
I actually told them that if they want to upgrade (new Civilization game out, seems to run a bit slow), the Phenom X4 and X6 chips are dirt-cheap now. Haven't heard back from them yet.
Pro-tip: Play against bots, not other people, and at a lower difficulty than you normally would.
Don't play against people for stress-relief, because there are players who play specifically to annoy other players, either to win in a dirty way (campers) or for its own sake (trolls).
Play at a low difficulty. Normally, you *want* to hit a point that you ave to get better, have to work at it, in order to win. But when playing to vent, drop the difficulty a notch or two below that, so you don't frustrate yourself.
Also, pick the right games. I've found Unreal Tournament 2004 (especially the Mutant gamemode) and Counter-Strike are the best for stress relief. The right music helps as well - I generally go for thrash metal, Ride the Lightning, Endgame, that kind of stuff.
Failing that, you need to treat the entire system as compromised, because it probably is. Do the following:
Bring a Linux live CD and an external hard drive. Boot ONLY into Linux, copy necessary files (documents, photos) over to the external hard drive.
Wipe the computer and reinstall everything from scratch. EVERYTHING. DBAN is your friend here. In fact, if he needs a bigger hard drive anyways, do that - just get a completely new hard drive.
Restore his data files from the backup you just made.
Yes, it's a pain, but at this point the system could contain something that anything short of this wouldn't clear out. (In fact, it's *possible* for malware to make it through even that, but AFAIK those are still just research demos, not in the wild).
Oh, don't be silly. Tinfoil won't stop the mind control rays - at least, not since all the major manufacturers were suborned by the Illuminati. No, to stop the Reptilians at the CIA from reading my mind, I use lead. It tends to flake more, but I find that it clears my mind, lets me see the TRUTH behind the LIES.
They're trying to keep people from thinking he's Batman, at least. They're trying to make him look more like, I dunno, Ant Man? Maybe one of the more pathetic villains - Penguin?
Doesn't seem to include "assassination" in the list of options.
Sure, if you just wanted to be rid of Assange, that would be easy. Snipers. Bombs. Even just a guy with a pistol.
Problem is, you have him killed in any way that looks deliberate, and he becomes a martyr. I would hope that anyone in power is smart enough to know that, but I've also learned that you can never underestimate just how stupid people can be.
Now, you could try other ways. If he was just in hiding, not causing an international incident in an embassy, you could stage a "mugging gone wrong" or even just a car accident. "Problem" eliminated, but it doesn't look like you did it. If you were really good, try to make it look like it *was* deliberate, but a plan by Ecuador from the beginning to kill him for... some reason. Has to be a good reason, obviously, but it's plausible.
But even then, he dies "fighting". It's obvious that they want to first assassinate his *character*, not the person himself. Assange the man is a nobody, a mildly egotistic anti-authoritarian who started a website almost anyone could make. The problem is Assange the concept, Assange the idea. The lone rebel trying to show the evil empires for what they really are.
That's who they need to eliminate. They started with the rape allegations. Perhaps they simply embellished what actually happened. Perhaps they twisted what was said, what was done. Perhaps they made the whole thing up. They've blurred the charges so much that I can't even tell what he's actually charged with anymore. But they did a good job of it - Assange the Idea, at least to some, is gone, replaced with Assange the Man, a man who (at worst) is a hypocritical rapist scumbag, or (at best) a regular guy who made a few mistakes on par with public intoxication.
Their next step, obviously, is to milk the "common criminal" idea for all it's worth. I don't think they'll even extradite him to the US to face some vague treason charge - that brings back discussion of the leaks, the rebel and the big bad empire. No, they'll try to avoid even mentioning that. They'll hit him with rape charges to make him scum (rape is often considered the worst crime, worse even than murder). They'll probably bring in charges like shoplifting to make him seem petty, small. Then when they've finished their show trial, they'll lock him away and try to shut him up. Only once he's in prison will they think of trying to kill him, again while avoiding martyrizing him (if it were an American prison, just staging a prison fight and shanking would be enough).
The problem with that plan is that it's not completely under our control. It could bloom out of control, causing even worse climate change in the opposite direction, and we'd have no way to stop it. And it would cause damage to the regular oceanic ecosystem even if it did work perfectly - plankton blooms already cause mass killings of fish.
And I've also heard that it may not actually sequester the CO2 all that well (much of it returning to the atmosphere), but I can't be assed to check up on that.
This actually seems like a feasible plan.
It plans not just for the extraction of atmospheric CO2, but the long-term storage of it. The power source is wind, so it doesn't fall into the trap of generating more CO2 than it generates.The choice of location makes sense for both the temperature and for the political neutrality. They don't list an actual cost, but it would likely be only in the tens of billions, hundreds of billions in the worst case. Which is a lot of money, yes, but not the trillions or quadrillions some plans have required. And it calls for a demonstration plant first, which would be just a few dozen million.
The only thing I see stopping it is politics. In particular, America and China. Europe seems to at least recognize the need for action, and they're willing to work together to try things. China is generally too selfish and shortsighted to worry about the environment, but you could probably convince them if you could make it somewhat-profitable for them (just have the wind turbines and such made in China, that should satisfy them).
But then it falls on to America. And you're going to need America at least not fighting this plan, because if the US decides to actively fight it, it's not happening. Period. You'd also need them to at least chip in a good chunk of the funding if you're going to do the full plan, make a serious dent in CO2. Problem is, denying the very existence global warming is a political *requirement* for half the country. They'll fight it just on principle, and I can't see the rest of the country fighting back for a project that doesn't have any immediate gains for the US specifically. While some sort of "compromise" could probably pull it off, or with luck it could be swept under the rug and never become a political issue, that's not guaranteed.
Still, it's the best plan I've seen so far.
They are, actually (at least in Vista and later, and for just directories as far back as 2K), but that's irrelevant.
If you set Samba to follow symlinks, it will present it to any client applications as though it were the actual file. So even old DOS-based Windows systems can handle it.
If it is a security hole that was either place deliberately, was known to the developers but not fixed within a reasonable time frame, or was caused by severe negligence, then yes, liability would be logical. But if it is a security hole that could have slipped through a *reasonable* QA process (ie. IBM's coders, not NASA's), then no.
Examples:
Program has a deliberate backdoor that allows for complete root access from any remote computer, protected only by a simple password that is the same for all installations and version. As this was deliberate, they are liable.
Program has a bug where the usernames and passwords are compared only on the first three characters. As this required both massively incompetent coding, and would have been caught by any reasonable testing, they are liable.
Program has one field in an obscure form that is vulnerable to SQL injection (the rest is properly secured against it). This was discovered during testing, but went unfixed for months until a major security breach was made public. As they had a reasonable amount of time to fix it but failed to do so, they are liable.
Program is accidentally distributed with a test account in the defaults that grants full read-only access to the system, resulting in numerous leaks of private information. As soon as it is discovered, a notice goes out to disable this account and it is removed in the next month's updates. As it was a bug that could have slipped through a reasonable QA process, and was remedied reasonably, they are not liable.
*looks at current laptop* Core i7 3610QM
*looks at wreckage of last laptop* Core 2 Duo P8400
*looks at primary desktop* dual Xeon 5150s
*looks at secondary desktop* Athlon 900
Yeah, if I were going to accuse myself of fanboyism, I think I'd accuse myself of fanboying for *Intel*, not AMD. Now granted, I've got a few more AMD-based builds under my belt, but I've either given them away (the Phenom X3 build) or accidentally fried them (the old Athlon XP build).
In all honesty, though, both companies have their good and bad points. Each had at least one total bomb (Pentium IV, Bulldozer). Each has good server chips for different workloads (Opterons (even the Bulldozer ones) are good for massive number crunching, Xeons are better for general server loads). On the desktop, Intel generally skews to higher prices and higher performance, while AMD aims for half the price and powerful enough. I'll even admit that AMD's current mobile chips (Fusion) are great - a decently-powerful CPU and a decently-powerful integrated GPU, with a low power draw and low price. I almost considered getting a cheaper, smaller Fusion-based laptop and a very powerful desktop, instead of getting the powerful monster of a laptop I ended up getting. Might have been a better idea, actually, but oh well.
No, I'm not saying it's factually incorrect. I'm saying that the way they put it into the summary was misleading flamebait.
A simple logical analysis shows that the primary factor in latency is instructions-per-clock, and clock speed (core count matters as well for applications with multithreaded rendering, but those are surprisingly few). The Phenom II series was good at both. The Sandy Bridge/Ivy Bridge Intel processors are also good at both, even a bit better. Bulldozer, unfortunately, went the Pentium IV route of aiming for a high clock speed (and high core count), which backfired when they relearned what Intel learned with the Pentium IV: that does not work. And so they're left with a dud processor line, but they don't even have the market share to survive just because they're big. This analysis also shows why it was a Phenom X4, not a Phenom X6, that earned AMD's top points - the X4s could reach a higher clock speed in the same thermal envelope as the X6, and thus the highest-clocked Phenom was the X4 980, supporting my hypothesis that few applications are able to use multiple threads for rendering.
Had they been able to phrase that information in a way that didn't sound like an Intel press release, they would have been fine. But it's hard to condense that into just a few sentences without coming off as biased in one direction or another.
For years, stupid PC hardware sites have maintained that CPUs have little impact on gaming performance; all you need is a decent graphics card. That position is largely supported by FPS averages, as most GPU tests are run using the most powerful CPU to prevent the CPU from being the limiting factor, but the FPS metric doesn't tell the whole story. Examining individual frame latencies better exposes the brief moments of stuttering that can disrupt otherwise smooth gameplay. Those methods have now been used to quantify the gaming performance of 18 CPUs spanning three generations by some site that really has nothing better to do than to restate the obvious for morons. [ed: removed fanboy-baiting statements from summary]
Random idea: 3D-print the mold for the barrel, pour molten steel into mold, allow to cool, then heat the thing until the mold plastic melts, leaving behind the barrel.
That's probably not how you make a *proper* barrel (ie. you won't be winning any awards for marksmanship), but that should suffice for at least a .22LR.
Dude, I was just about to say that.
Hell, if the whole "Windows" thing fails on them, they should just fall back on their Xbox/gaming division (who seem at least decently competent (and profitable)), and re-use that logo.
Now what's interesting is that that logo predates Metallica (or at least their first album) - "Kill 'em All" was released in 1983, while that Microsoft logo was dropped in 1981.
Mostly-static web server, maybe? Hook it up to a SAN for storage, let it cache in RAM or on the internal SSD. A large number of small cores would alleviate many of the problems in handling thousands of concurrent connections, and if none of the pages require intensive calculation, it could work pretty well.
To be fair, this one was actually mildly interesting compared to the inanity and insanity of most /BI posts.
So as it turns out, yes, VMWare can run Crysis. Er, Crisis.
The reason this is valuable is not so much that it's economical today, as that there's enough uranium in the ocean to provide all our electricity needs for millions of years.
But it might prove useful for decontamination. Perhaps the uranium-free water is more important than the water-free uranium.
It might also prove useful for countries trying to develop nuclear systems (both peaceful and military) in secret. Sure, you'd still have to use a centrifuge process to get weapons-grade stuff, but this would allow any non-landlocked country to obtain natural-state uranium.
The question is one of difficulty and context.
For instance, the lock on my floppy disc holder (yes, I still have one) can be opened simply by sticking a flathead screwdriver in it and turning. I would consider that to "meet the standard that a reasonable person would regard as satisfactory" for a cheap plastic floppy holder. I would NOT consider that lock to "meet the standard that a reasonable person would regard as satisfactory" for securing a hotel room.
So it depends on how difficult it is to hack. Personally, the description makes it seem like a reasonably technical hack; the design was fairly solid, and any hack that requires disassembling the lock is not something you can do discreetly. So I would say it "meets the standard that a reasonable person would regard as satisfactory" for a hotel. But not for, say, securing a bank vault.
Ah, thanks for the warning. I have a standing policy against reading Gizmodo - I don't particularly care about the whole "buying stolen iPhone prototypes" thing, they just have horrible technical writing and are incredible Apple-biased
Only if they claim it can treat dementia. If they just claim it's a fun game that involves a lot of thinking, or even call it "brain exercises", that's not FDA jurisdiction. But if they claim it can treat dementia, then it is claiming to be a medical treatment and thus would (and, I argue, should) be regulated just as any other medical treatment. It could probably breeze through many of the certifications (it's not like video games have many drugs that they can interact with), but trying to add exceptions to the "if it claims to treat a disease, it's regulated" is a slippery slope.
Now, I do have to say that I think most things in this country are over-regulated, especially in the medical field, but that's a matter of specifics, whereas I speak here only of general principle.
Any app that claims to either itself be a cure/treatment, or which directly interfaces with a system that is (or is already subject to regulation), gets regulated. So a "game" that claims to treat dementia, or an app that interfaces with a medical records system needs to be regulated, or an app that connects to a pacemaker for diagnostics, would need regulation.
Anything that simply offers medical information or rudimentary "advice" is fine. So a WebMD-type app would need no regulation, although it could still cause liability if it's wrong to the point of causing physical harm.
Basically, replace "app" with "book" and see if it makes sense.
"This book contains a list of diseases, cross-indexed by symptom. It does not need to be regulated."
"This book contains the complete medical history of everyone who has ever visited this hospital. It should be subject to basic regulation regarding patient privacy."
"This book allows the doctor to control an implanted medical device. It should be strictly regulated, including stringent testing and controlled distribution."