This is all based on the 8 million or so daily tests conducted on Speedtest's website and apps, by the way, so the data is pretty sound.
So how many people on the same old DSL line run a speed test to check that there speed is the same as it was 10 years ago? People use speed tests when they got a new line, they've upgraded it or they're troubleshooting. They don't do it at random. Our national statistics here in Norway is based on collection of subscription statistics, which seems far more reliable as users would probably complain if they didn't get what they paid for. Last figures are 1,914,431 broadband connections, average of 40.2 Mbps with a median of 25.6 Mbps.
You have the expense of laying track, plus the expense of producing a very small number of these extremely specialized vehicles. Why not lay track and run a mass-produced light rail train or streetcar on it instead?
Lack of space, number of crossings required. This looks like an attempt to make a cheap subway, going above instead of going below. You will have all the annoyances of a tram line though, one car stuck in the tracks, an accident or such and you're blocked. On the other hand, if they jam full that bus like the Japanese do it could transport a helluva lot of people.
I would think the GP meant "select and engage" as opposed to say "select and evade", that is to say it'll start shooting at craft, people and buildings nobody told it was a target. If you just want a sentry gun that shoots anything with a heat signature that's easy, if you're cool with it mowing down any civilians or friendlies that wander into the kill zone. That said if you can nuke Hiroshima and Nagasaki and burn Vietnam with napalm I'm sure some collateral death by automation won't stop anyone in a real war. It would take a "total war" justification to really take the gloves off, but seeing as WWIII would probably start with nukes flying I'd say the gloves would already be off.
Younger Millenials are fucked. They have less jobs, less stable jobs, less income, more debt, higher rents, etc, etc,... and most importantly less opportunity to buy a home. They cannot afford one, they will not be given a loan, they cannot hope to get the cash together to get on with their lives and pay for the dating scene. It's the economy stupid.
If they're all poor who is stealing all their dates? I doubt the young women are sleeping with 40yos just because they have money. Even in third world countries people get laid, if the dating scene costs are getting out of hand it must be because the supply is drying up and you have to fight your way to a scarce resource. The economy can't fix that, that'll just be a game of musical chairs with too few chairs.
This happened in Japan. It's happenning here. The sexy-time rate, house-buying rate, and baby popping rate are directly proportional to the opportunity and stability on offer to young people in society.
If by proportional you mean inversely proportional, in general the better off people are the less kids they have - it's the third world countries in Africa that have the most kids. A few people who won't have kids because they don't want to be poor doesn't buck that trend. Not that they have much to do with each other anymore, you can fuck your way through college and still be childless while the anti-contraception religious get a bun in the oven almost every time. If and when women feel their biological clock is ticking they can get their 2-3 kids without a very active sex life the rest of the time.
Bitcoin exchanges seem to be hacked on a regular basis. Whether it's a genuine hack or insider funny-business hardly matters at this point. The take-away is that Bitcoin exchanges just aren't a safe place to keep your virtual money, which means there doesn't seem to be a safe place to store virtual money.
Since we're already using wallet analogies, would you walk around with your life's savings in your wallet? Do you expect all stores to stop handling cash because you got mugged in a back alley or tricked by a pickpocket? Money you have on exchanges is like money you've taken to the marketplace, it's where you can spend them but you also run a risk of losing them. If you want a secure wallet, create a cold storage wallet and burn it to a CD and put it in a bank vault, then you'll have the security of a bank vault. Just make sure that if you ever need it you access it from a secure device, for example a live CD like Tails to transfer as much as needed to a "hot" wallet. Like putting money in the real wallet we once used to have.
It gets rather ridiculous when you realize that movies like "The Martian" were finished in 2.5K, even in the biggest theaters I don't think you see anyone calling it blurry. If you are the one in a million with 20/8 vision - the diffraction limit of a perfect eye - you have a resolution of 0.4 arc minutes = 1/150th degree. Front row of the cinema is ~50 degrees field of vision (FoV) so 50*150 = 7500 pixel resolution. So 8K (7680-8192 depending on definition) is theoretically necessary to exceed everyone's optimal vision.
But if you have 20/16 vision, not to unusual in healthy teens but the best most people will ever see you're down to half that or 3750 pixels. If you sit in the middle of the cinema (~40 degree FoV) then you'd need 20/12 vision to go beyond 4K. If you're at couch distance or "only" have 20/20 vision, forget about it. And most importantly this really only matters if you're staring at an eye chart, I can do it pixel peeping on a still picture doing A/B testing but I doubt it matters in practice.
Heck, for my eyes comparing to the UHD monitor I found that replacing my 60" 1080p TV just wouldn't make any sense, even sitting in the closest chair. It'd take a 80-100" TV/projector for me to notice the difference. Anything else is contrast, color, dynamic range and so on not resolution. Same thing with the UHDTV standard, yes it's more resolution and that's easy to understand. But Rec.2020, 10 bit color as standard, HDR etc. is what really makes the change worthwhile.
The Win10 deadline came and went as almost everyone suspected, and with this change in consumer strategy they have zero incentive to raise the "price". I expect them to start moving up the non-enterprise end of life dates on previous versions instead. Win7 support ends in 2020? Not so fast, it's 2018. If you miss that deadline, pay $119 for the "safety and security" of Win10.
I'm sure we could get more unwanted nagware or telemetry "features" on Win7, but they've never messed with already promised support deadlines. That would make all their corporate/enterprise customers question the validity of their support guarantees, it'd be shooting themselves in the foot in a major way. And I really doubt Microsoft will try to collect money on upgrades, sure they had to put a deadline and try to scare people into upgrading now rather than later but I'm sure there will be loopholes and new rounds to "encourage" people to upgrade. Feels good to get a $119 upgrade for free if you're smart, right? Setting a ridiculously high sticker price and slashing it is the oldest salesman trick in the book.
Sounds like bullshit to me. I'm sure Gawker has every intention of taking all the cheap shots they can at Thiel before they get locked out of their offices.
Possibly. But he wouldn't be the first guy to get obsessed with the fact that they're going to die like the rest of us. A bunch get religious but you also have cryonics, uploading your brain to a computer and so on which is way into sci-fantasy land for the time being. Heck you even have people who think a caveman diet will do it. With all due respect to the scientific progress we are making, all we can cure of disease and injury we haven't even scratched the surface on reversing aging.
Humans have been fundamentally altering the relationship dynamics of the modern world ever since the first human decided they knew exactly what a "perfect" relationship should be. Porn wasn't invented yesterday. Neither was divorce, so perhaps we can stop with blaming the Tinder generation now.
I'm pretty sure porn is just a small pawn in it, what you're really seeing is contraception + legalized abortion + time. If you were 18 at Woodstock you'd be ~65 by now, even the people who weren't hippies probably got a far more nuanced picture of the relation between love and sex than the generations before them. And those generations, well they're now dying out. Out of the liberal 60s and 70s came a big scary panic about STDs and AIDS and maybe a counter-reaction as they became parents against "free love" and all that but the doomsday predictions lost steam. People have sex and for the most part nothing bad happen, there's nothing wrong with just having sex in order to have sex. And that people watch sex (porn) for the same reason is more a symptom than a cause, though there's feedback loops all around.
if this isn't a deal breaker for the 22% of slashdotters who would vote for Trump
If you can't get around Trump's "corporate partnerships" - whatever that means - hand in your geek card now. In fact, hand in your "I'm not a retard" card. Not to mention I'm fairly sure the/. demographic is almost exclusively 18+ and have full legal access anyway. This is to please the frigid right, but it means absolutely nothing.
If you should remove every pokemon in a zone of half a block around any sex offender, due to the size of the sex offender list there is no more place you can put a pokemon on the map of the USA:)
I think you got that backwards. Due to number of "minimum x hundred meters from any school, park, whatever" quite ordinary urban areas are mostly off limits and so sex offenders are squished together in small areas that meet all the requirements. Heck I've even read stories that people ended up living under a bridge because there was no damn way to avoid all the limitations - probably intentionally so they'd move and be somebody else's problem. And due to the notification requirements the whole neighborhood is perfectly aware of this concentration which leads to most everyone else getting the hell out of there. So no, you'd have lots of circles but most of them would intersect ending up not covering much of the US at all.
Microsoft sees themselves as less and less of an OS company, and more of a business services company, especially with the cloud. Windows is only a small portion of Microsoft revenue now, so they don't feel such a need to support it. It's possible that within the next decade, they may become to view it as a cost center, rather than a profit center.
And how much of their other products have any significant revenue on non-Windows platforms? I know they're trying with Office 365 and open sourcing.NET Core and SQL Server for Linux but once you leave the Microsoft platform you also tend to buy a lot less of their other products and services. Maybe it's not the big cash cow anymore but it's the foot in the door so Microsoft can push all their other business solutions. And you know they're dreaming of taking a 30% cut of every UWP application, which they can't do unless people use Windows. Maybe it wouldn't hurt their cash flow much directly but I'd say strategically Microsoft would be fools to give up on the OS, both on the business and consumer side.
The most aggravating thing for me at the moment is the layer masking capability - GIMP can do it AFAIK but it can't import the masking in from a PSD file. Which is not altogether surprising given that PSD is proprietary and effectively undocumented.
"Welcome home, Mr Garibaldi!!!" The thing that made Babylon 5 stand out - especially given the vast amount of money being thrown at other contemporary sci-fi shows of the era, like Star TreK: Next Generation - was the passion that cast and crew had for the show and the respect they had for each other.
I think it's the story wide arch and that most of the episodes helped form the characters, explaining why they did the things they do later. If you watch TNG and miss five episodes you've barely missed a thing, it's the same crew on the bridge and their characters barely change at all. Sure it's a new situation every time but you can pretty much drop the crew from the first episode into the last episode and it'd all play out the same.
That said, I missed the beginning of the show and never got into it at first because they totally lacked a "previously on Babylon 5" to give you some essential plot pointers. I didn't get into it until season 3 when the Vorlon/Shadows were threatening to destroy everyone, then went back and saw it from the beginning. The Crusade spin-off wasn't the same, it was more of the episodic format that made it just another TV show and the movies didn't last long enough to build up any arch like what carried the show.
Today I think the CGI budget would have killed it. We're getting used to more and more "alien" aliens not all humanoids - though B5 had a neat explanation for that too which tied into the plot - but today we can do so much more though at a very high cost. In animation you can do a more cartoon-like style but having aliens that look like they really belong next to an actor is still freakishly expensive.
I must be getting in early as there is no whining so far about GIMP being far inferior to Photoshop. What real world work can be done in Photoshop but not GIMP? I'm not trolling, this is a serious question... often obscure seldom-used features get compared... out there in the world of practical productive work, what are the true shortcomings?
Well in the stable 2.8.x series you only have 8 bit support, not 16/32 bit as far as I know. That alone makes it pretty unsuitable for any serious photography work. From the bullet points of the 2.9.2 development release last year:
16/32bit per color channel processing
So they finally did it in 2015... well except it's not stable yet. They've only been talking about it for like 15 years. The other big one is non-destructive edits, basically Photoshop will let you do many operations that you can tweak later because it'll reapply them to the original image. That way you're not stuck with a linear undo-redo history you can actually modify an operation you did several steps back. The rest are as you say obscure functions, but much like Excel many people need a few of them so they add up. And often it's not can you do it, but is it equally intuitive and powerful. Five minutes extra here and there add up.
Personally I've found Paint.NET on Windows and Krita on Linux to cover my needs and somehow they feel more right to me. Photoshop is more of a "I'm sure it's powerful if I'd only bother to learn it" tool, while GIMP... I feel it's just trying to be odd for no particular reason, it's not that it doesn't work but it feel like they have their own pet UX theory. Like the DVORAK keyboard of editing tools.
You're probably not missing anything.. but when I compare this to say $2000 robot lawn mowers which I see quite a few of here in Norway I could imagine a vegetable patch robot pulling it off with the "I'd do homegrown organic but I'm too busy" crowd if this makes it easier to grow lots of different vegetables and herbs and whatnot that have different needs and won't mind if you go on vacation. This looks like a bit too much DYI though, I was thinking more like you put a seed bag with a QR code in a slot and the bot will grow it according to the instructions. And maybe with a delay so you have a ripe plant every two weeks instead of all at once, things like that. I doubt it'll make economic sense, but then... neither does my robot vacuum cleaner. Still got it, still love not vacuuming and not depending on a maid.
Show me this type of vulnerability in VMware, any version. I think you are a bit off base here. The Xen Guys are good, it sucks when this type of vulnerability were to surface, but there has never been one like this on vSphere.
Any computer software more complex than this has bugs: 10 PRINT "HELLO, WROLD!" 20 GOTO 10 . . . (so does this one)
There is no perfect system (nirvana fallacy) and your discussion does not compare the advantages and disadvantages of each system, and instead arrives at a conclusion based on listing disadvantages. Voters can already be intimidated and provide proof of their vote with MMS, or any of the myriad photo-sharing apps, many of which are now providing end-to-end encryption.
Not the way paper ballots are done here in Norway at least. You pick a ballot, fold it double so your vote is on the inside but they all look identical on the outside. Then you go outside the booth to get a stamp, not really sure why and then put it in the ballot box. You can of course film yourself picking up the "right" ballot, but you won't be allowed to film your actual placing of the vote. Nothing can stop you from putting the ballot back and picking another one before stepping outside.
The elimination of the voter being able to prove how they voted through official documentation removes the voter's ability to perform an audit of their own vote's tabulation. Voters uncovering elections fraud outweighs the very small (non-existent? - provide a link to cases of these claims, ever? Appeal to probability much?) vote-buying instances.
Outright buying maybe not, peer pressure hell yeah. In this family we vote [party] or all your friends showing off their [party] votes, if you don't show yours you can bet they'll assume it's for [other party] and you'll get punished/teased/blackmailed for it. I think you forget that leaving people will proof would lead to a lot of people sharing and showing off that proof and making life difficult for those who "have something to hide".
And how does dark matter explain this? If you cant prove it even exists?
Dark matter is not an explanation, it's a placeholder. What we've observed is a gravitational pull we can't explain, to which there are three possible explanations:
1) Our formula for gravity is wrong 2) There is matter of known types we haven't detected 3) There is one or more unknown types of matter at play
We've looked hard at modifying the theory of gravity but all the proposed modifications cause it to fail other results that are correct today. So assuming the formula is correct, we can estimate how much mass is "missing" and we label this dark matter. And then search the particles we know to see what other effects they'd have, to get some upper bound on how much of the dark matter it is. And then we find it doesn't add up to 100%, not even close. Most explanations rush this part and go right to all the potential candidates for what the rest is.
So we've found more of the traditional matter, that's neat. We know it's out there, we don't know exactly where and how much. But we know it's not enough to explain everything, not in the places it needs to be. I'm not sure how to explain it in a good way, it's like proving that you can't go to the moon with a horse and carriage. It's not about how many horses there are, there could be an infinite number to give you infinite horsepower and it still wouldn't work. You need a different kind of propulsion. Same way with dark matter, no matter how much traditional matter you add it doesn't work. You need something else.
With HDDs you could access individual sectors and zap em as appropriate. With SSDs that's not the case. Everything is logically mapped by a controller and you have to trust it to do a secure erase properly - either resetting the encryption key or filling every block (even the ones used for over-provisioning) with 0s.
It's been a long, long time since you could do that. All modern HDDs do sector remapping behind the scenes, whatever written to a sector the disk later identifies as wonky and remaps is untouchable. Only secure erase will overwrite every sector, it predates SSDs by many years.
Remember when tech pundits were talking like the Internet would transcend to become it's own nation that people would emigrate to and live in? Well shit turns out we still live in meatspace with countries and laws. And surprise, surprise so does our data. The cloud is just the new buzzword for the same concept without the people. I suppose companies will try to go jurisdiction shopping, but I doubt they'll succeed. The governments of the world will set requirements for dealing with their citizen's data and you'll either comply or get in legal trouble, like the EU's "right to be forgotten". Yes, it means data on the Chinese might stay in China but it might also mean data on US citizens stay in the US. Would you really like them to swap? Or do you just want to fulfill the NSAs wet dream that all data on everyone in the whole world go through the US? Seriously, for most of us local data is a good thing.
Apropos of nothing... Just how hard is it to disable one of these $600,000 mobile golf carts? For example, can a high powered rifle pierce any of the antennas, control electronics, or motive hardware? Would an IED be sufficient? And having done so, what dangers might the recovery team face?
The US got massively superior firepower if they can just locate the enemy. And they won't be medics in a hurry because he's bleeding out. Taking out one of these would be announcing to the world here I am, come kill me. And you got them to reveal themselves without putting any soldiers at risk. And if they're plagued with hit and run attacks they can set an ambush of their own like a hidden sniper covering the patrol area or a squad that'll cut them off from behind. And you could probably make dumb decoys for a fraction of the cost for the enemy to waste their time on if they actually start attacking them.
Sure, some of these might be destroyed but what would be the cost of human patrols, with their armored vehicle and high end gear? If the enemy has high powered rifles and IEDs they could do damage to non-drone equipment and injure or kill soldiers too. Ultimately it's a matter of resources, if the US can get them to waste their sniper rifles and IEDs on non-human targets it's pretty much a win no matter what. It's dead soldiers that zaps the will to fight, the military industry and their lobby will make sure money is not a problem.
So make it equally first amendment to block them. My phone line does not have to accept every call made to it.
This. I should be able to set up a "EULA" on my phone, my mailbox, my email account and whatever else communication channel I have indicating what forms/groups/types of contact I will accept. Anyone wishing to contact me would have to self-certify that they belong to a category I'll accept. Then you can make it an offense to lie, just like on immigration forms.
Car analogy time: Someone who only cares about performance? We call those race drivers. Someone who only wants a solid car to drive often? Taxi driver. Car enthusiasts/nerds will probably have some oddball car polished and styled in top condition and spend an inordinate amount of time keeping it that way. That said, most of them don't want a broken transmission. It's not the sort of thing you casually tinker with, it's very basic functionality that has to work. Fixing it yourself would be very nerdy but it's for a special few. I have the feeling OS/driver issues are the same for computer nerds, most want that part to work so they can be nerds on a different level. It's not exactly like a kernel panic makes me want to be a kernel developer...
Slashdot Mirror
This is all based on the 8 million or so daily tests conducted on Speedtest's website and apps, by the way, so the data is pretty sound.
So how many people on the same old DSL line run a speed test to check that there speed is the same as it was 10 years ago? People use speed tests when they got a new line, they've upgraded it or they're troubleshooting. They don't do it at random. Our national statistics here in Norway is based on collection of subscription statistics, which seems far more reliable as users would probably complain if they didn't get what they paid for. Last figures are 1,914,431 broadband connections, average of 40.2 Mbps with a median of 25.6 Mbps.
You have the expense of laying track, plus the expense of producing a very small number of these extremely specialized vehicles. Why not lay track and run a mass-produced light rail train or streetcar on it instead?
Lack of space, number of crossings required. This looks like an attempt to make a cheap subway, going above instead of going below. You will have all the annoyances of a tram line though, one car stuck in the tracks, an accident or such and you're blocked. On the other hand, if they jam full that bus like the Japanese do it could transport a helluva lot of people.
I would think the GP meant "select and engage" as opposed to say "select and evade", that is to say it'll start shooting at craft, people and buildings nobody told it was a target. If you just want a sentry gun that shoots anything with a heat signature that's easy, if you're cool with it mowing down any civilians or friendlies that wander into the kill zone. That said if you can nuke Hiroshima and Nagasaki and burn Vietnam with napalm I'm sure some collateral death by automation won't stop anyone in a real war. It would take a "total war" justification to really take the gloves off, but seeing as WWIII would probably start with nukes flying I'd say the gloves would already be off.
Younger Millenials are fucked. They have less jobs, less stable jobs, less income, more debt, higher rents, etc, etc,... and most importantly less opportunity to buy a home. They cannot afford one, they will not be given a loan, they cannot hope to get the cash together to get on with their lives and pay for the dating scene. It's the economy stupid.
If they're all poor who is stealing all their dates? I doubt the young women are sleeping with 40yos just because they have money. Even in third world countries people get laid, if the dating scene costs are getting out of hand it must be because the supply is drying up and you have to fight your way to a scarce resource. The economy can't fix that, that'll just be a game of musical chairs with too few chairs.
This happened in Japan. It's happenning here. The sexy-time rate, house-buying rate, and baby popping rate are directly proportional to the opportunity and stability on offer to young people in society.
If by proportional you mean inversely proportional, in general the better off people are the less kids they have - it's the third world countries in Africa that have the most kids. A few people who won't have kids because they don't want to be poor doesn't buck that trend. Not that they have much to do with each other anymore, you can fuck your way through college and still be childless while the anti-contraception religious get a bun in the oven almost every time. If and when women feel their biological clock is ticking they can get their 2-3 kids without a very active sex life the rest of the time.
Bitcoin exchanges seem to be hacked on a regular basis. Whether it's a genuine hack or insider funny-business hardly matters at this point. The take-away is that Bitcoin exchanges just aren't a safe place to keep your virtual money, which means there doesn't seem to be a safe place to store virtual money.
Since we're already using wallet analogies, would you walk around with your life's savings in your wallet? Do you expect all stores to stop handling cash because you got mugged in a back alley or tricked by a pickpocket? Money you have on exchanges is like money you've taken to the marketplace, it's where you can spend them but you also run a risk of losing them. If you want a secure wallet, create a cold storage wallet and burn it to a CD and put it in a bank vault, then you'll have the security of a bank vault. Just make sure that if you ever need it you access it from a secure device, for example a live CD like Tails to transfer as much as needed to a "hot" wallet. Like putting money in the real wallet we once used to have.
It gets rather ridiculous when you realize that movies like "The Martian" were finished in 2.5K, even in the biggest theaters I don't think you see anyone calling it blurry. If you are the one in a million with 20/8 vision - the diffraction limit of a perfect eye - you have a resolution of 0.4 arc minutes = 1/150th degree. Front row of the cinema is ~50 degrees field of vision (FoV) so 50*150 = 7500 pixel resolution. So 8K (7680-8192 depending on definition) is theoretically necessary to exceed everyone's optimal vision.
But if you have 20/16 vision, not to unusual in healthy teens but the best most people will ever see you're down to half that or 3750 pixels. If you sit in the middle of the cinema (~40 degree FoV) then you'd need 20/12 vision to go beyond 4K. If you're at couch distance or "only" have 20/20 vision, forget about it. And most importantly this really only matters if you're staring at an eye chart, I can do it pixel peeping on a still picture doing A/B testing but I doubt it matters in practice.
Heck, for my eyes comparing to the UHD monitor I found that replacing my 60" 1080p TV just wouldn't make any sense, even sitting in the closest chair. It'd take a 80-100" TV/projector for me to notice the difference. Anything else is contrast, color, dynamic range and so on not resolution. Same thing with the UHDTV standard, yes it's more resolution and that's easy to understand. But Rec.2020, 10 bit color as standard, HDR etc. is what really makes the change worthwhile.
The Win10 deadline came and went as almost everyone suspected, and with this change in consumer strategy they have zero incentive to raise the "price". I expect them to start moving up the non-enterprise end of life dates on previous versions instead. Win7 support ends in 2020? Not so fast, it's 2018. If you miss that deadline, pay $119 for the "safety and security" of Win10.
I'm sure we could get more unwanted nagware or telemetry "features" on Win7, but they've never messed with already promised support deadlines. That would make all their corporate/enterprise customers question the validity of their support guarantees, it'd be shooting themselves in the foot in a major way. And I really doubt Microsoft will try to collect money on upgrades, sure they had to put a deadline and try to scare people into upgrading now rather than later but I'm sure there will be loopholes and new rounds to "encourage" people to upgrade. Feels good to get a $119 upgrade for free if you're smart, right? Setting a ridiculously high sticker price and slashing it is the oldest salesman trick in the book.
Sounds like bullshit to me. I'm sure Gawker has every intention of taking all the cheap shots they can at Thiel before they get locked out of their offices.
Possibly. But he wouldn't be the first guy to get obsessed with the fact that they're going to die like the rest of us. A bunch get religious but you also have cryonics, uploading your brain to a computer and so on which is way into sci-fantasy land for the time being. Heck you even have people who think a caveman diet will do it. With all due respect to the scientific progress we are making, all we can cure of disease and injury we haven't even scratched the surface on reversing aging.
Humans have been fundamentally altering the relationship dynamics of the modern world ever since the first human decided they knew exactly what a "perfect" relationship should be. Porn wasn't invented yesterday. Neither was divorce, so perhaps we can stop with blaming the Tinder generation now.
I'm pretty sure porn is just a small pawn in it, what you're really seeing is contraception + legalized abortion + time. If you were 18 at Woodstock you'd be ~65 by now, even the people who weren't hippies probably got a far more nuanced picture of the relation between love and sex than the generations before them. And those generations, well they're now dying out. Out of the liberal 60s and 70s came a big scary panic about STDs and AIDS and maybe a counter-reaction as they became parents against "free love" and all that but the doomsday predictions lost steam. People have sex and for the most part nothing bad happen, there's nothing wrong with just having sex in order to have sex. And that people watch sex (porn) for the same reason is more a symptom than a cause, though there's feedback loops all around.
if this isn't a deal breaker for the 22% of slashdotters who would vote for Trump
If you can't get around Trump's "corporate partnerships" - whatever that means - hand in your geek card now. In fact, hand in your "I'm not a retard" card. Not to mention I'm fairly sure the /. demographic is almost exclusively 18+ and have full legal access anyway. This is to please the frigid right, but it means absolutely nothing.
If you should remove every pokemon in a zone of half a block around any sex offender, due to the size of the sex offender list there is no more place you can put a pokemon on the map of the USA :)
I think you got that backwards. Due to number of "minimum x hundred meters from any school, park, whatever" quite ordinary urban areas are mostly off limits and so sex offenders are squished together in small areas that meet all the requirements. Heck I've even read stories that people ended up living under a bridge because there was no damn way to avoid all the limitations - probably intentionally so they'd move and be somebody else's problem. And due to the notification requirements the whole neighborhood is perfectly aware of this concentration which leads to most everyone else getting the hell out of there. So no, you'd have lots of circles but most of them would intersect ending up not covering much of the US at all.
Microsoft sees themselves as less and less of an OS company, and more of a business services company, especially with the cloud. Windows is only a small portion of Microsoft revenue now, so they don't feel such a need to support it. It's possible that within the next decade, they may become to view it as a cost center, rather than a profit center.
And how much of their other products have any significant revenue on non-Windows platforms? I know they're trying with Office 365 and open sourcing .NET Core and SQL Server for Linux but once you leave the Microsoft platform you also tend to buy a lot less of their other products and services. Maybe it's not the big cash cow anymore but it's the foot in the door so Microsoft can push all their other business solutions. And you know they're dreaming of taking a 30% cut of every UWP application, which they can't do unless people use Windows. Maybe it wouldn't hurt their cash flow much directly but I'd say strategically Microsoft would be fools to give up on the OS, both on the business and consumer side.
The most aggravating thing for me at the moment is the layer masking capability - GIMP can do it AFAIK but it can't import the masking in from a PSD file. Which is not altogether surprising given that PSD is proprietary and effectively undocumented.
*cough*
"Welcome home, Mr Garibaldi!!!" The thing that made Babylon 5 stand out - especially given the vast amount of money being thrown at other contemporary sci-fi shows of the era, like Star TreK: Next Generation - was the passion that cast and crew had for the show and the respect they had for each other.
I think it's the story wide arch and that most of the episodes helped form the characters, explaining why they did the things they do later. If you watch TNG and miss five episodes you've barely missed a thing, it's the same crew on the bridge and their characters barely change at all. Sure it's a new situation every time but you can pretty much drop the crew from the first episode into the last episode and it'd all play out the same.
That said, I missed the beginning of the show and never got into it at first because they totally lacked a "previously on Babylon 5" to give you some essential plot pointers. I didn't get into it until season 3 when the Vorlon/Shadows were threatening to destroy everyone, then went back and saw it from the beginning. The Crusade spin-off wasn't the same, it was more of the episodic format that made it just another TV show and the movies didn't last long enough to build up any arch like what carried the show.
Today I think the CGI budget would have killed it. We're getting used to more and more "alien" aliens not all humanoids - though B5 had a neat explanation for that too which tied into the plot - but today we can do so much more though at a very high cost. In animation you can do a more cartoon-like style but having aliens that look like they really belong next to an actor is still freakishly expensive.
I must be getting in early as there is no whining so far about GIMP being far inferior to Photoshop. What real world work can be done in Photoshop but not GIMP? I'm not trolling, this is a serious question ... often obscure seldom-used features get compared ... out there in the world of practical productive work, what are the true shortcomings?
Well in the stable 2.8.x series you only have 8 bit support, not 16/32 bit as far as I know. That alone makes it pretty unsuitable for any serious photography work. From the bullet points of the 2.9.2 development release last year:
16/32bit per color channel processing
So they finally did it in 2015... well except it's not stable yet. They've only been talking about it for like 15 years. The other big one is non-destructive edits, basically Photoshop will let you do many operations that you can tweak later because it'll reapply them to the original image. That way you're not stuck with a linear undo-redo history you can actually modify an operation you did several steps back. The rest are as you say obscure functions, but much like Excel many people need a few of them so they add up. And often it's not can you do it, but is it equally intuitive and powerful. Five minutes extra here and there add up.
Personally I've found Paint.NET on Windows and Krita on Linux to cover my needs and somehow they feel more right to me. Photoshop is more of a "I'm sure it's powerful if I'd only bother to learn it" tool, while GIMP... I feel it's just trying to be odd for no particular reason, it's not that it doesn't work but it feel like they have their own pet UX theory. Like the DVORAK keyboard of editing tools.
You're probably not missing anything.. but when I compare this to say $2000 robot lawn mowers which I see quite a few of here in Norway I could imagine a vegetable patch robot pulling it off with the "I'd do homegrown organic but I'm too busy" crowd if this makes it easier to grow lots of different vegetables and herbs and whatnot that have different needs and won't mind if you go on vacation. This looks like a bit too much DYI though, I was thinking more like you put a seed bag with a QR code in a slot and the bot will grow it according to the instructions. And maybe with a delay so you have a ripe plant every two weeks instead of all at once, things like that. I doubt it'll make economic sense, but then... neither does my robot vacuum cleaner. Still got it, still love not vacuuming and not depending on a maid.
Show me this type of vulnerability in VMware, any version. I think you are a bit off base here. The Xen Guys are good, it sucks when this type of vulnerability were to surface, but there has never been one like this on vSphere.
Any computer software more complex than this has bugs:
10 PRINT "HELLO, WROLD!"
20 GOTO 10
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(so does this one)
There is no perfect system (nirvana fallacy) and your discussion does not compare the advantages and disadvantages of each system, and instead arrives at a conclusion based on listing disadvantages. Voters can already be intimidated and provide proof of their vote with MMS, or any of the myriad photo-sharing apps, many of which are now providing end-to-end encryption.
Not the way paper ballots are done here in Norway at least. You pick a ballot, fold it double so your vote is on the inside but they all look identical on the outside. Then you go outside the booth to get a stamp, not really sure why and then put it in the ballot box. You can of course film yourself picking up the "right" ballot, but you won't be allowed to film your actual placing of the vote. Nothing can stop you from putting the ballot back and picking another one before stepping outside.
The elimination of the voter being able to prove how they voted through official documentation removes the voter's ability to perform an audit of their own vote's tabulation. Voters uncovering elections fraud outweighs the very small (non-existent? - provide a link to cases of these claims, ever? Appeal to probability much?) vote-buying instances.
Outright buying maybe not, peer pressure hell yeah. In this family we vote [party] or all your friends showing off their [party] votes, if you don't show yours you can bet they'll assume it's for [other party] and you'll get punished/teased/blackmailed for it. I think you forget that leaving people will proof would lead to a lot of people sharing and showing off that proof and making life difficult for those who "have something to hide".
And how does dark matter explain this? If you cant prove it even exists?
Dark matter is not an explanation, it's a placeholder. What we've observed is a gravitational pull we can't explain, to which there are three possible explanations:
1) Our formula for gravity is wrong
2) There is matter of known types we haven't detected
3) There is one or more unknown types of matter at play
We've looked hard at modifying the theory of gravity but all the proposed modifications cause it to fail other results that are correct today. So assuming the formula is correct, we can estimate how much mass is "missing" and we label this dark matter. And then search the particles we know to see what other effects they'd have, to get some upper bound on how much of the dark matter it is. And then we find it doesn't add up to 100%, not even close. Most explanations rush this part and go right to all the potential candidates for what the rest is.
So we've found more of the traditional matter, that's neat. We know it's out there, we don't know exactly where and how much. But we know it's not enough to explain everything, not in the places it needs to be. I'm not sure how to explain it in a good way, it's like proving that you can't go to the moon with a horse and carriage. It's not about how many horses there are, there could be an infinite number to give you infinite horsepower and it still wouldn't work. You need a different kind of propulsion. Same way with dark matter, no matter how much traditional matter you add it doesn't work. You need something else.
With HDDs you could access individual sectors and zap em as appropriate. With SSDs that's not the case. Everything is logically mapped by a controller and you have to trust it to do a secure erase properly - either resetting the encryption key or filling every block (even the ones used for over-provisioning) with 0s.
It's been a long, long time since you could do that. All modern HDDs do sector remapping behind the scenes, whatever written to a sector the disk later identifies as wonky and remaps is untouchable. Only secure erase will overwrite every sector, it predates SSDs by many years.
Remember when tech pundits were talking like the Internet would transcend to become it's own nation that people would emigrate to and live in? Well shit turns out we still live in meatspace with countries and laws. And surprise, surprise so does our data. The cloud is just the new buzzword for the same concept without the people. I suppose companies will try to go jurisdiction shopping, but I doubt they'll succeed. The governments of the world will set requirements for dealing with their citizen's data and you'll either comply or get in legal trouble, like the EU's "right to be forgotten". Yes, it means data on the Chinese might stay in China but it might also mean data on US citizens stay in the US. Would you really like them to swap? Or do you just want to fulfill the NSAs wet dream that all data on everyone in the whole world go through the US? Seriously, for most of us local data is a good thing.
Apropos of nothing... Just how hard is it to disable one of these $600,000 mobile golf carts? For example, can a high powered rifle pierce any of the antennas, control electronics, or motive hardware? Would an IED be sufficient? And having done so, what dangers might the recovery team face?
The US got massively superior firepower if they can just locate the enemy. And they won't be medics in a hurry because he's bleeding out. Taking out one of these would be announcing to the world here I am, come kill me. And you got them to reveal themselves without putting any soldiers at risk. And if they're plagued with hit and run attacks they can set an ambush of their own like a hidden sniper covering the patrol area or a squad that'll cut them off from behind. And you could probably make dumb decoys for a fraction of the cost for the enemy to waste their time on if they actually start attacking them.
Sure, some of these might be destroyed but what would be the cost of human patrols, with their armored vehicle and high end gear? If the enemy has high powered rifles and IEDs they could do damage to non-drone equipment and injure or kill soldiers too. Ultimately it's a matter of resources, if the US can get them to waste their sniper rifles and IEDs on non-human targets it's pretty much a win no matter what. It's dead soldiers that zaps the will to fight, the military industry and their lobby will make sure money is not a problem.
So make it equally first amendment to block them. My phone line does not have to accept every call made to it.
This. I should be able to set up a "EULA" on my phone, my mailbox, my email account and whatever else communication channel I have indicating what forms/groups/types of contact I will accept. Anyone wishing to contact me would have to self-certify that they belong to a category I'll accept. Then you can make it an offense to lie, just like on immigration forms.
Car analogy time:
Someone who only cares about performance? We call those race drivers. Someone who only wants a solid car to drive often? Taxi driver. Car enthusiasts/nerds will probably have some oddball car polished and styled in top condition and spend an inordinate amount of time keeping it that way. That said, most of them don't want a broken transmission. It's not the sort of thing you casually tinker with, it's very basic functionality that has to work. Fixing it yourself would be very nerdy but it's for a special few. I have the feeling OS/driver issues are the same for computer nerds, most want that part to work so they can be nerds on a different level. It's not exactly like a kernel panic makes me want to be a kernel developer...
Indeed, the sample size is small, but how are they supposed to get a larger sample?
Send more men? I'm sure if they get the research grant NASA will be willing to help them out...