You're missing the bigger picture -- whether Usenet itself is dead or not, the fact that we're replacing open protocols with closed, proprietary web interfaces controlled by a single entity is a huge regression. Replacing Usenet with 8 million different web forums that I have to register with individually and use a different interface to read is not an improvement.
Well the nice things about web forums is that they can set their own terms for registration, moderation, user behavior and so on and if people don't like it they can move to a different one. Newsgroups kinda worked so long as bandwidth was a scarce resource and you wouldn't just waste it needlessly. You had moderated groups but that was very rudimentary and not very popular, but the rest was just open season for spam and trolls and bots. Without changing signup captchas to keep mass signups at bay most forums would be nothing but trash. Same thing about email, once the spammers got hold of it you'd see an endless number of trash emails.
Unfortunately applying the same rules uniformly more or less means you have to have one entity controlling it all, it's no good if I have a strict policy and you allow every rabble in. Same thing with who gets moderator privileges or moderator points, any form of assignment or formula needs someone controlling it. I suppose you could have a somewhat decentralized organization like IRC networks, where some servers belong to the same network and some don't all while running the same protocol, but still. To be honest, I don't think the market wants more protocols since most everything now runs over HTTP, almost totally regardless of what it is. At best maybe you could make some kind of HTTP "API" so you could use different messaging software but I doubt it. Most sites actually like being in control of layout and such.
To all windows users: you are always welcome here in the linux world. There is a place free for you!
Your "free place for you" comes with a LOT of hidden costs for most people and 99.9999% of the time
You do know what he said means there's room for more? You're the one who twisted it into being about being free - particularly as in cost, but not time. Nor did he make any grand claims about it being so easy your grandma could use it, so I don't see the basis of your rant. But if you're the kind of guy that cares about this - because honestly, we know most people don't - then maybe you care enough to actually deal with all the crap you need to as a Linux user. It's a matter of priorities, either you make Microsoft change their tune (unlikely), suck it up (probably) or switch (unlikely).
Personally I'm absolutely considering demoting my Windows to a Wintendo when 7 runs out of support and just let Microsoft 0wn my gaming box and deal with Linux for anything important. I did it once before when I thought the alternative was Vista and it sucked, stuck with it a few years but Win7 roped be back in. Maybe now it'll suck less but last time I tried a year ago, sigh... Either your needs need to be very simple or you better have tech skills, get caught in between and Linux will be a frustrating experience for most.
The woman, whose name has not been disclosed, said that when the allegations became public she received threats and found it impossible to work. She said that she was judged in a "gigantic court of public opinion with anonymous judges and witnesses who guessed wildly".
This tends to happen in almost every case regardless if it goes to trial because the standard there is "beyond a reasonable doubt". There's a wide berth between being convicted of false accusations and guilty beyond a shadow of a doubt where people speculate in the probable and improbable. And even when people do get convicted they speculate in everything from misjudgments to false testimony to conspiracies. As long as we don't have absolute knowledge and we never have and never will some people will take the accuser's side and some will take the accused's side and they'll be very angry with each other.
I'd be absolutely furious if someone accused me of a rape I didn't commit and nobody believed me. I'd be absolutely furious if I'd been raped and nobody believed me. Like it or not there will be a battle in the public opinion and there will be a battle in the private sphere as to who your friends and family and coworkers believe. And that's all it'll be, a battle of credibility because most of the time there is no evidence of any substance. And sadly enough most of the actual criminals knows who has the upper hand in advance, they'll rape victims that are so drunk their testimony will be a mess. Or that "no smoke without fire" will win this custody case. Short of saying all sex is rape without signed consent forms I don't see a solution though.
Tor is secure. Where people have been located, it was due to bugs on the bundled browser and not following best security practices like disabling Javascript and not using a maximized browser window (to thwart canvas based fingerprinting). But the underlying network itself is secure.
That or share too much information about yourself or your other online activity or download malicious content. It doesn't even have to be malware as such but say an MP3 where your media player tries to download cover art, any kind of functionality that could lead to non-TOR traffic. Or socially engineer you to visit a popular YouTube video in your ordinary browser using a special URL. It could be they have a exploit on core TOR, but in that case I'm guessing it's in the NSA vaults along with the AES backdoor.
People don't understand the power of profiling and combinatorics. For example say you look at my posting history, I've probably casually mentioned my age a few times - let's say you have my birthday pinned down to a month even though I never said when it was. My sex too in some context, I presume. And I've at one point mentioned my country, my hometown (>150k) and that I used to live in the capital (>600k). If you have a post saying "I'm moving back home soon" that's enough to pinpoint me, if you have access to the right registry.
How does that work? Well you have ~145k registered domestic moves. Only ~49k are between different parts of the country. In total there's about ~9k for my hometown, those are all public statistics. So about (49/145)*9k = 3k long-distance moves to my town, for argument we'll assume all are from the capital. If average lifespan is 80, my month is roughly 1/(80*12) of the total population so ~3 moves of people my age and ~1.5 if you add sex. If soon means the coming month you're down to 1.5/12 = ~1/8. Even with some non-uniformity and whatnot it'll probably be one, at most two.
People don't stop to think about these things, particularly when it appears to happen in "private", but services get compromised. Or are honeypots to begin with. And even if you use PGP or some other secure channel, what used to be a buddy today can be compromised tomorrow. And this gets more and more important as we leave more and more "real world" electronic traces, like that concert you were at - were you also tagged on Facebook? In the past it would have been almost useless information, today a few such tidbits of information can easily lead to just having a handful of suspects to investigate closer.
Y'know, Microsoft has never made any bones about their OS being a proprietary system.
Windows made money selling copies. Apple makes money taking a cut of every sale in their walled garden. Google makes money data mining the shit out of everything. The new Microsoft seems to want to be the old Microsoft + Apple + Google. It used to be pick your poison, now it's all of the above. I hope they choke on it.
And from what I've seen of college kids now, while they're not watching television per se - they do seem to spend an inordinate amount of time watching stuff like YouTube and swapping SnapChat videos (they don't seem to actually chat much on SnapChat, which seems weird but them I'm old). It wouldn't surprise me if the total amount of time they spend on new media rivals what their parents and grandparents spend in front of the boob tube.
Meet the new boob tube, same as the old boob tube. Except more boobs.
No. We honestly need to expect a certain level of competency from ENGINEERS. People are allowed to be stupid.
People can be as stupid or drunk or tired or half-blind as they like, LICENSED DRIVERS who operate two tons of metal travelling at 70+ mph need to take some damn responsibility for that. Thankfully he only won a Darwin award but if he'd killed somebody I'd call that a clear case of vehicular manslaughter which can land you in prison for a very long time. Drivers that can't do their part should hand in their license and wait for the real self-driving cars.
I don't wonder. I see it as one of the human brain's greatest weaknesses. More and more research shows that once people pick a side, they are highly likely to dig in and contrary evidence actually reinforces their incorrect position. Perhaps this served some evolutionary purpose (you only need to learn fire is hot once)
Probably more local diversity so we don't get wiped out by spurious reasoning, mono-culture or get stuck on some local maximum. Instead of risking the whole tribe jumping on what they think is a good thing we'll divide into camps with the old ways and the new ways like a primitive scientific experiment. Today we don't have that strong evolutionary pressure but back when people would starve and freeze and die from all sorts of injuries and diseases I imagine this could be rather important in a shifting environment with droughts and floods and heat waves and cold waves and packs of animals coming and going could change the optimal choice quite often. Perhaps we had an evolutionary need to have people stick with what's worked in the past even if it doesn't seem to be working right now.
The other part might be that we're used to people having an agenda. The more persistent people are to convince you something is true, the more skeptical we get. There might be a value to having made up your own opinion rather than to take someone else's, even if it's wrong. That one seems even more relevant today, since more and more of what we do is make ourselves familiar with second hand knowledge, things others have found out and put to paper. There's so many tons of it you just have to accept you barely have time to get a tiny glimpse of our collective knowledge. And let's face it, a lot of that has been fantasy and fiction. You can't see AGW, but people say it exists like they used to say dragons exist. It's hard to know what is actually facts.
Reality check, all non-Windows platforms combined have <5% market share on Steam and falling. Most users couldn't install a new OS if they wanted to and even if they did they'd miss all their other Windows applications. And even assuming they did they'd lose a ton of Windows exclusive games that wouldn't run despite Steam being on Linux and suffer performance/driver issues in many others. Valve would have to do much more to make AAA games support Vulkan well if they want people to even consider a Steam Machine.
So secure, they've eliminated the users. And to further enhance security they'll soon bury them in a landfill. Why do we even bother running the story? They make Linux on the desktop seem mainstream...
Buy ones that a little behind the cutting edge, ones from a few months ago. 80% of the performance at 30% of the price.
Are you trying to be funny? Even if you said years, almost two years ago I bought the GTX 970 for pretty close to MSRP of $329. If you think you can get 80% of that for 30% or <$100 today you're delusional. Don't get me wrong, today you can get roughly the same DX11 performance in a Radeon RX 480 4GB for $199 so it's lost quite a bit of value but it's not like last year's cards turn to shit anymore. A GTX 980 Ti will still kick a lot of ass simply because it's a 600mm^2 250W truck, sure there's a bigger and more badass truck but it'll still crush a compact car despite being a few generations old and the price reflects that. Sure, if you can get a deal from a gamer just trying to get rid of his card at any price really...
We can have enough missiles pointed at you to turn all of your major cities into slag, but we won't do it because you have enough missiles pointed at us to turn all of our major cities into slag. The MAD balance depends on both sides being unable to defend themselves, only retaliate. If one side can nuke the other side's cities and shoot down the retaliation, there is no balance. One side wins, the other loses. How is that hard to understand?
Of course there's such a thing as not wanting war, like why would Americans want to kill Russians or Russians want to kill Americans today? But MAD isn't about that, it's about a power balance where war would doom both sides. While an arms race stalemate might temporarily keep us from destroying each other, I hope that lasting peace will come from a more positive source of inspiration. Because I never really expected MAD to last forever.
Probably a bad idea. Any active action to prevent the police from gaining access would probably be considered obstruction of justice, any non-police duress won't stop there. It would also prove the phone in question is programmed to respond to your fingerprints, which by itself is evidence. Perhaps it's your teenage kid's phone that he forgot and you're bringing it to him, possession is not proof of access.
If you do want a panic button and is willing to deal with the consequences it should simply irrecoverably wipe the device. Either way offer only passive resistance. If they have to do paperwork and time runs out, tough. If they try the wrong fingers and run out of attempts, tough. Configure your device any way you want up front but don't help, don't obstruct. But if you're seriously worried I'd just turn it off and use a PIN.
If you take a bitcoin address and print out the hash, you could put that under your mattress and delete the file.
Pretty sure you meant to say something else, you can print out the private keys associated with the public hashes but if all you have is the hash you got nothing. You can see the Bitcoins are there, but you can't send them to anyone so they're effectively lost.
My guess is that Anandtech got the conclusion for that one already written just substitute for this generation:
With an average performance deficit of just 3%, GeForce GTX 980 Ti is for all intents and purposes GTX Titan X with a different name. (...) With a launch price of $649, the GTX 980 Ti may as well be an unofficial price cut to GTX Titan X, delivering flagship GeForce performance for 35% less.
I expect that the GTX 1080 Ti will come in at $799/$899 (FE) in Q4 2016 or Q1 2017, this time with partner boards. And then there will be a new card with HBM2 to become the new Titan.
But what happened to all the good Republican candidates? I'm a long way away from the US, but trying to make sense of it.
The short summary: The primaries are extremely dominated by special interest groups (SIGs), because if they can get a sympathetic candidate the actual election will be a coin flip of who people dislike the least. So what happens is that a lot of moderates get caught in no man's land because the SIGs support their hardline candidate and if you can't get any momentum out the gate the chances of recovering 5-10 states down the line as people realize their favorite won't make it is slim and none. It's hard to find a moderate that many people would be happy with, until it's clear they'd lose and would rather compromise.
I get the feeling that dark matter is today's epicycles
Well you're not the first one, there have been multiple attempts to modify gravity so that it gives the right answers without introducing additional matter. Unfortunately that tends to break other results that our current theory of gravity gets right and trying to "fix" that usually ends up in just as convoluted theories as dark matter/dark energy. Personally I think it's easy to feel like solid matter is a wall but we know radio transmissions pass through it like it was nothing. And neutrinos pass through the planet without even noticing. I don't find it particularly hard to imagine that there are particles that have even less interaction, given what we already know.
Investing isn't just "doing nothing". You have to chose well and know what will take off and what won't.
Speculation is trying to pick the right horse. Investment can be just as much about trying to create a balanced portfolio that'll get you a reliable return. You tend to hear all about the spectacular successes and failures, but a vast number of companies produce the nuts and bolts, everyday objects that don't change much at all - not the production systems, not the demand, not the competition. But somebody owns it and somebody's getting a return on it. It's not very exciting to hear that they got 5% ROI while the stock market index 4% ROI though, so you don't read about it much.
What really matters is the value of labor vs capital, once we had artisans and master craftsmen whose work was highly valued. Then we had industrialization and it trended more towards capital, then it trended more towards knowledge workers and now with automation it's trending more towards capital again. If the rich accumulate wealth quicker through capital than people do through labor then the gap widens. The winner is the ones who can invest a billion in self-driving cars, the loser all the people who used to earn a living driving.
Sure, some people will gamble and bet on the right horse or the wrong horse and either join the capitalists or flunk out back to the working class. But they're just statistical noise when it comes to the rest question, how much of the wealth does the 0,1%, 1%, 10% control? It excludes the whole issue about who left and who joined, only how unequal wealth is distributed. And last I heard the differences were increasing, the rich are accelerating away. They don't have to be super good at investing, they just need to not be super dumb.
Already KAT-7, the seven test radio telescopes that preceded this was sensitive enough to make new discoveries. And it's only going to get better from here, with the full SKA operational it'll be a new world for radio astronomy.
Slashdot used to be very pro-uber. What happened? Is this the result of the new owners? Are people's opinions so easily swayed? Is this a case of not thinking it through originally?
Same thing that usually happens, you make this new and "flat" power structure then it turns out there's actually a few people/companies with a lot of power or making a lot of money anyway. Before artists had to deal with a few big labels, then they had to deal with a few big stores like iTunes now they have to deal with a few big streaming services like Spotify. Love Wikipedia, hate Jimmy Wales. Love Ubuntu, hate Mark Shuttleworth. Love Red Hat, hate Lennart Poettering. Break Microsoft's monopoly, get the Apple walled garden. Break Apple's walled garden, get Google's mass data mining.
I think some of the idealism and naivety have gone out of the/. crowd, they're much quicker to see what the end game will be and people's true agenda. And it's hardly as selfless as to revolutionize a taxi service stuck in the whip and buggy days. And I think a lot of the tech optimism I remember from the dotcom days has passed, I'm so good I can negotiate my own way I don't need any organization with dead weight holding me back. And then they outsource the whole thing to India or hire in cheap H1-Bs to replace you.
Not that regulation is all good, of course. But it's a bit more complicated than being all bad. Like the "here's a license that's practically a sale, without any of the benefits of ownership" or "here's a work contract that's practically employment, without any of the benefits of being an employee". Because companies have to problems sourcing labor where it's cheapest but sell you region-locked content so they can sell it expensive, they don't have any moral integrity. The social contract only works on small scales, on large scales with faceless mega-corporations answering to thousands of shareholders the only contract is the letter of the law.
I got her in to the pain clinic at Emory University Hospital in Atlanta and the doctor there did a nerve ablation that gave her relief from the pain. It came back and she had to have further treatment but the last 3 years have been pain free. It seems that if doctors can't figure what to do they just throw pills at it.
I'm glad you figured out a way to end the pain, just realize that there are many painful diseases and injuries we don't have a cure for no matter how long and hard you search. Using medication to numb the pain is in many cases the best we can do to reduce suffering, whether it's short term until it heals, more or less permanent against chronic disease or just to ease the passing for terminal diseases. I don't think doctors want to "throw pills at it" if they can see a better option. But sometimes specialists can see possibilities others don't, that's why we have them so sure try all options. Just don't expect it to work for everyone.
Real progress would, in fact, be not having to compile for dozens of different architectures. Such as describing a way, in a standardised language, of being able to do anything, no matter the underlying hardware. Remember those days? When languages did that for you?
Not really, no.
No more reinventing the fucking wheel for every platform, no more having to compile multiple versions and formats (...), the best performance you can get for that particular architecture
Hardware has different capabilities. Platforms have different capabilities. Abstractions and layers of indirection trade performance and simplicity for interoperability and reuse, you will never write code that is "perfect" on all metrics. So you want your application to output sound, great. So tell me how would you write code that runs on everything from a Sound Blaster from the 90s to bitstreaming over HDMI and any and all future formats yet to come? Does the OS have some kind of configuration if you want this to play on headphones or not?
That's when you start stubbing out APIs, my game wants to output sound and I'll make my own function do to the right thing for this sound card. Then maybe the OS will abstract that away and your app just hands it off so it can do the right thing. And then maybe the hardware will abstract that away so the OS can talk one standard like USB audio. But all of this is a work in progress that's constantly expanded because we want hardware or software to do new things. Maybe we want hardware mixing or don't want to play sound on this machine but pipe it somewhere else over the network.
What you are asking for is essentially like every other attempt at cross hardware/platform development ever. Write C, no more hardware-specific assembler. Don't write for 3dfx, matrox, nVidia, write for DirectX or OpenGL. Write Java, write once run everywhere. There's many reasons we move in that direction. There's also many reasons we sometimes move in the other direction, like now with Vulkan we're basically scaling back OpenGL and saying game engines use this low level interface instead of the abstractions because they're holding you back.
For starters, the only bird type that can hover in one spot is the Hummingbird. If you see a large bird hovering perfectly still in one spot, you can bet your ass it's a drone.
Well if you bothered to properly disguise your drone as a bird I'm sure you'd have a program to fly in gentle circles like a bird searching for pray to "hover" over an area. Otherwise it'd be kinda obvious.
Slashdot Mirror
You're missing the bigger picture -- whether Usenet itself is dead or not, the fact that we're replacing open protocols with closed, proprietary web interfaces controlled by a single entity is a huge regression. Replacing Usenet with 8 million different web forums that I have to register with individually and use a different interface to read is not an improvement.
Well the nice things about web forums is that they can set their own terms for registration, moderation, user behavior and so on and if people don't like it they can move to a different one. Newsgroups kinda worked so long as bandwidth was a scarce resource and you wouldn't just waste it needlessly. You had moderated groups but that was very rudimentary and not very popular, but the rest was just open season for spam and trolls and bots. Without changing signup captchas to keep mass signups at bay most forums would be nothing but trash. Same thing about email, once the spammers got hold of it you'd see an endless number of trash emails.
Unfortunately applying the same rules uniformly more or less means you have to have one entity controlling it all, it's no good if I have a strict policy and you allow every rabble in. Same thing with who gets moderator privileges or moderator points, any form of assignment or formula needs someone controlling it. I suppose you could have a somewhat decentralized organization like IRC networks, where some servers belong to the same network and some don't all while running the same protocol, but still. To be honest, I don't think the market wants more protocols since most everything now runs over HTTP, almost totally regardless of what it is. At best maybe you could make some kind of HTTP "API" so you could use different messaging software but I doubt it. Most sites actually like being in control of layout and such.
To all windows users: you are always welcome here in the linux world. There is a place free for you!
Your "free place for you" comes with a LOT of hidden costs for most people and 99.9999% of the time
You do know what he said means there's room for more? You're the one who twisted it into being about being free - particularly as in cost, but not time. Nor did he make any grand claims about it being so easy your grandma could use it, so I don't see the basis of your rant. But if you're the kind of guy that cares about this - because honestly, we know most people don't - then maybe you care enough to actually deal with all the crap you need to as a Linux user. It's a matter of priorities, either you make Microsoft change their tune (unlikely), suck it up (probably) or switch (unlikely).
Personally I'm absolutely considering demoting my Windows to a Wintendo when 7 runs out of support and just let Microsoft 0wn my gaming box and deal with Linux for anything important. I did it once before when I thought the alternative was Vista and it sucked, stuck with it a few years but Win7 roped be back in. Maybe now it'll suck less but last time I tried a year ago, sigh... Either your needs need to be very simple or you better have tech skills, get caught in between and Linux will be a frustrating experience for most.
The woman, whose name has not been disclosed, said that when the allegations became public she received threats and found it impossible to work. She said that she was judged in a "gigantic court of public opinion with anonymous judges and witnesses who guessed wildly".
This tends to happen in almost every case regardless if it goes to trial because the standard there is "beyond a reasonable doubt". There's a wide berth between being convicted of false accusations and guilty beyond a shadow of a doubt where people speculate in the probable and improbable. And even when people do get convicted they speculate in everything from misjudgments to false testimony to conspiracies. As long as we don't have absolute knowledge and we never have and never will some people will take the accuser's side and some will take the accused's side and they'll be very angry with each other.
I'd be absolutely furious if someone accused me of a rape I didn't commit and nobody believed me. I'd be absolutely furious if I'd been raped and nobody believed me. Like it or not there will be a battle in the public opinion and there will be a battle in the private sphere as to who your friends and family and coworkers believe. And that's all it'll be, a battle of credibility because most of the time there is no evidence of any substance. And sadly enough most of the actual criminals knows who has the upper hand in advance, they'll rape victims that are so drunk their testimony will be a mess. Or that "no smoke without fire" will win this custody case. Short of saying all sex is rape without signed consent forms I don't see a solution though.
McDonalds passed 100 billion burgers in the 90s, the estimate today is 3-400 billion. And it's definitively changed America(ns) too.
Tor is secure. Where people have been located, it was due to bugs on the bundled browser and not following best security practices like disabling Javascript and not using a maximized browser window (to thwart canvas based fingerprinting). But the underlying network itself is secure.
That or share too much information about yourself or your other online activity or download malicious content. It doesn't even have to be malware as such but say an MP3 where your media player tries to download cover art, any kind of functionality that could lead to non-TOR traffic. Or socially engineer you to visit a popular YouTube video in your ordinary browser using a special URL. It could be they have a exploit on core TOR, but in that case I'm guessing it's in the NSA vaults along with the AES backdoor.
People don't understand the power of profiling and combinatorics. For example say you look at my posting history, I've probably casually mentioned my age a few times - let's say you have my birthday pinned down to a month even though I never said when it was. My sex too in some context, I presume. And I've at one point mentioned my country, my hometown (>150k) and that I used to live in the capital (>600k). If you have a post saying "I'm moving back home soon" that's enough to pinpoint me, if you have access to the right registry.
How does that work? Well you have ~145k registered domestic moves. Only ~49k are between different parts of the country. In total there's about ~9k for my hometown, those are all public statistics. So about (49/145)*9k = 3k long-distance moves to my town, for argument we'll assume all are from the capital. If average lifespan is 80, my month is roughly 1/(80*12) of the total population so ~3 moves of people my age and ~1.5 if you add sex. If soon means the coming month you're down to 1.5/12 = ~1/8. Even with some non-uniformity and whatnot it'll probably be one, at most two.
People don't stop to think about these things, particularly when it appears to happen in "private", but services get compromised. Or are honeypots to begin with. And even if you use PGP or some other secure channel, what used to be a buddy today can be compromised tomorrow. And this gets more and more important as we leave more and more "real world" electronic traces, like that concert you were at - were you also tagged on Facebook? In the past it would have been almost useless information, today a few such tidbits of information can easily lead to just having a handful of suspects to investigate closer.
Y'know, Microsoft has never made any bones about their OS being a proprietary system.
Windows made money selling copies. Apple makes money taking a cut of every sale in their walled garden. Google makes money data mining the shit out of everything. The new Microsoft seems to want to be the old Microsoft + Apple + Google. It used to be pick your poison, now it's all of the above. I hope they choke on it.
Only works on Win10 Pro/Enterprise via group policy. That's not really an option for most people.
And from what I've seen of college kids now, while they're not watching television per se - they do seem to spend an inordinate amount of time watching stuff like YouTube and swapping SnapChat videos (they don't seem to actually chat much on SnapChat, which seems weird but them I'm old). It wouldn't surprise me if the total amount of time they spend on new media rivals what their parents and grandparents spend in front of the boob tube.
Meet the new boob tube, same as the old boob tube. Except more boobs.
No. We honestly need to expect a certain level of competency from ENGINEERS. People are allowed to be stupid.
People can be as stupid or drunk or tired or half-blind as they like, LICENSED DRIVERS who operate two tons of metal travelling at 70+ mph need to take some damn responsibility for that. Thankfully he only won a Darwin award but if he'd killed somebody I'd call that a clear case of vehicular manslaughter which can land you in prison for a very long time. Drivers that can't do their part should hand in their license and wait for the real self-driving cars.
I don't wonder. I see it as one of the human brain's greatest weaknesses. More and more research shows that once people pick a side, they are highly likely to dig in and contrary evidence actually reinforces their incorrect position. Perhaps this served some evolutionary purpose (you only need to learn fire is hot once)
Probably more local diversity so we don't get wiped out by spurious reasoning, mono-culture or get stuck on some local maximum. Instead of risking the whole tribe jumping on what they think is a good thing we'll divide into camps with the old ways and the new ways like a primitive scientific experiment. Today we don't have that strong evolutionary pressure but back when people would starve and freeze and die from all sorts of injuries and diseases I imagine this could be rather important in a shifting environment with droughts and floods and heat waves and cold waves and packs of animals coming and going could change the optimal choice quite often. Perhaps we had an evolutionary need to have people stick with what's worked in the past even if it doesn't seem to be working right now.
The other part might be that we're used to people having an agenda. The more persistent people are to convince you something is true, the more skeptical we get. There might be a value to having made up your own opinion rather than to take someone else's, even if it's wrong. That one seems even more relevant today, since more and more of what we do is make ourselves familiar with second hand knowledge, things others have found out and put to paper. There's so many tons of it you just have to accept you barely have time to get a tiny glimpse of our collective knowledge. And let's face it, a lot of that has been fantasy and fiction. You can't see AGW, but people say it exists like they used to say dragons exist. It's hard to know what is actually facts.
Reality check, all non-Windows platforms combined have <5% market share on Steam and falling. Most users couldn't install a new OS if they wanted to and even if they did they'd miss all their other Windows applications. And even assuming they did they'd lose a ton of Windows exclusive games that wouldn't run despite Steam being on Linux and suffer performance/driver issues in many others. Valve would have to do much more to make AAA games support Vulkan well if they want people to even consider a Steam Machine.
So secure, they've eliminated the users. And to further enhance security they'll soon bury them in a landfill. Why do we even bother running the story? They make Linux on the desktop seem mainstream...
Buy ones that a little behind the cutting edge, ones from a few months ago. 80% of the performance at 30% of the price.
Are you trying to be funny? Even if you said years, almost two years ago I bought the GTX 970 for pretty close to MSRP of $329. If you think you can get 80% of that for 30% or <$100 today you're delusional. Don't get me wrong, today you can get roughly the same DX11 performance in a Radeon RX 480 4GB for $199 so it's lost quite a bit of value but it's not like last year's cards turn to shit anymore. A GTX 980 Ti will still kick a lot of ass simply because it's a 600mm^2 250W truck, sure there's a bigger and more badass truck but it'll still crush a compact car despite being a few generations old and the price reflects that. Sure, if you can get a deal from a gamer just trying to get rid of his card at any price really...
We can have enough missiles pointed at you to turn all of your major cities into slag, but we won't do it because you have enough missiles pointed at us to turn all of our major cities into slag. The MAD balance depends on both sides being unable to defend themselves, only retaliate. If one side can nuke the other side's cities and shoot down the retaliation, there is no balance. One side wins, the other loses. How is that hard to understand?
Of course there's such a thing as not wanting war, like why would Americans want to kill Russians or Russians want to kill Americans today? But MAD isn't about that, it's about a power balance where war would doom both sides. While an arms race stalemate might temporarily keep us from destroying each other, I hope that lasting peace will come from a more positive source of inspiration. Because I never really expected MAD to last forever.
Probably a bad idea. Any active action to prevent the police from gaining access would probably be considered obstruction of justice, any non-police duress won't stop there. It would also prove the phone in question is programmed to respond to your fingerprints, which by itself is evidence. Perhaps it's your teenage kid's phone that he forgot and you're bringing it to him, possession is not proof of access.
If you do want a panic button and is willing to deal with the consequences it should simply irrecoverably wipe the device. Either way offer only passive resistance. If they have to do paperwork and time runs out, tough. If they try the wrong fingers and run out of attempts, tough. Configure your device any way you want up front but don't help, don't obstruct. But if you're seriously worried I'd just turn it off and use a PIN.
If you take a bitcoin address and print out the hash, you could put that under your mattress and delete the file.
Pretty sure you meant to say something else, you can print out the private keys associated with the public hashes but if all you have is the hash you got nothing. You can see the Bitcoins are there, but you can't send them to anyone so they're effectively lost.
My guess is that Anandtech got the conclusion for that one already written just substitute for this generation:
With an average performance deficit of just 3%, GeForce GTX 980 Ti is for all intents and purposes GTX Titan X with a different name. (...) With a launch price of $649, the GTX 980 Ti may as well be an unofficial price cut to GTX Titan X, delivering flagship GeForce performance for 35% less.
I expect that the GTX 1080 Ti will come in at $799/$899 (FE) in Q4 2016 or Q1 2017, this time with partner boards. And then there will be a new card with HBM2 to become the new Titan.
But what happened to all the good Republican candidates? I'm a long way away from the US, but trying to make sense of it.
The short summary: The primaries are extremely dominated by special interest groups (SIGs), because if they can get a sympathetic candidate the actual election will be a coin flip of who people dislike the least. So what happens is that a lot of moderates get caught in no man's land because the SIGs support their hardline candidate and if you can't get any momentum out the gate the chances of recovering 5-10 states down the line as people realize their favorite won't make it is slim and none. It's hard to find a moderate that many people would be happy with, until it's clear they'd lose and would rather compromise.
I get the feeling that dark matter is today's epicycles
Well you're not the first one, there have been multiple attempts to modify gravity so that it gives the right answers without introducing additional matter. Unfortunately that tends to break other results that our current theory of gravity gets right and trying to "fix" that usually ends up in just as convoluted theories as dark matter/dark energy. Personally I think it's easy to feel like solid matter is a wall but we know radio transmissions pass through it like it was nothing. And neutrinos pass through the planet without even noticing. I don't find it particularly hard to imagine that there are particles that have even less interaction, given what we already know.
Investing isn't just "doing nothing". You have to chose well and know what will take off and what won't.
Speculation is trying to pick the right horse. Investment can be just as much about trying to create a balanced portfolio that'll get you a reliable return. You tend to hear all about the spectacular successes and failures, but a vast number of companies produce the nuts and bolts, everyday objects that don't change much at all - not the production systems, not the demand, not the competition. But somebody owns it and somebody's getting a return on it. It's not very exciting to hear that they got 5% ROI while the stock market index 4% ROI though, so you don't read about it much.
What really matters is the value of labor vs capital, once we had artisans and master craftsmen whose work was highly valued. Then we had industrialization and it trended more towards capital, then it trended more towards knowledge workers and now with automation it's trending more towards capital again. If the rich accumulate wealth quicker through capital than people do through labor then the gap widens. The winner is the ones who can invest a billion in self-driving cars, the loser all the people who used to earn a living driving.
Sure, some people will gamble and bet on the right horse or the wrong horse and either join the capitalists or flunk out back to the working class. But they're just statistical noise when it comes to the rest question, how much of the wealth does the 0,1%, 1%, 10% control? It excludes the whole issue about who left and who joined, only how unequal wealth is distributed. And last I heard the differences were increasing, the rich are accelerating away. They don't have to be super good at investing, they just need to not be super dumb.
Already KAT-7, the seven test radio telescopes that preceded this was sensitive enough to make new discoveries. And it's only going to get better from here, with the full SKA operational it'll be a new world for radio astronomy.
Slashdot used to be very pro-uber. What happened? Is this the result of the new owners? Are people's opinions so easily swayed? Is this a case of not thinking it through originally?
Same thing that usually happens, you make this new and "flat" power structure then it turns out there's actually a few people/companies with a lot of power or making a lot of money anyway. Before artists had to deal with a few big labels, then they had to deal with a few big stores like iTunes now they have to deal with a few big streaming services like Spotify. Love Wikipedia, hate Jimmy Wales. Love Ubuntu, hate Mark Shuttleworth. Love Red Hat, hate Lennart Poettering. Break Microsoft's monopoly, get the Apple walled garden. Break Apple's walled garden, get Google's mass data mining.
I think some of the idealism and naivety have gone out of the /. crowd, they're much quicker to see what the end game will be and people's true agenda. And it's hardly as selfless as to revolutionize a taxi service stuck in the whip and buggy days. And I think a lot of the tech optimism I remember from the dotcom days has passed, I'm so good I can negotiate my own way I don't need any organization with dead weight holding me back. And then they outsource the whole thing to India or hire in cheap H1-Bs to replace you.
Not that regulation is all good, of course. But it's a bit more complicated than being all bad. Like the "here's a license that's practically a sale, without any of the benefits of ownership" or "here's a work contract that's practically employment, without any of the benefits of being an employee". Because companies have to problems sourcing labor where it's cheapest but sell you region-locked content so they can sell it expensive, they don't have any moral integrity. The social contract only works on small scales, on large scales with faceless mega-corporations answering to thousands of shareholders the only contract is the letter of the law.
I got her in to the pain clinic at Emory University Hospital in Atlanta and the doctor there did a nerve ablation that gave her relief from the pain. It came back and she had to have further treatment but the last 3 years have been pain free. It seems that if doctors can't figure what to do they just throw pills at it.
I'm glad you figured out a way to end the pain, just realize that there are many painful diseases and injuries we don't have a cure for no matter how long and hard you search. Using medication to numb the pain is in many cases the best we can do to reduce suffering, whether it's short term until it heals, more or less permanent against chronic disease or just to ease the passing for terminal diseases. I don't think doctors want to "throw pills at it" if they can see a better option. But sometimes specialists can see possibilities others don't, that's why we have them so sure try all options. Just don't expect it to work for everyone.
Real progress would, in fact, be not having to compile for dozens of different architectures. Such as describing a way, in a standardised language, of being able to do anything, no matter the underlying hardware. Remember those days? When languages did that for you?
Not really, no.
No more reinventing the fucking wheel for every platform, no more having to compile multiple versions and formats (...), the best performance you can get for that particular architecture
Hardware has different capabilities. Platforms have different capabilities. Abstractions and layers of indirection trade performance and simplicity for interoperability and reuse, you will never write code that is "perfect" on all metrics. So you want your application to output sound, great. So tell me how would you write code that runs on everything from a Sound Blaster from the 90s to bitstreaming over HDMI and any and all future formats yet to come? Does the OS have some kind of configuration if you want this to play on headphones or not?
That's when you start stubbing out APIs, my game wants to output sound and I'll make my own function do to the right thing for this sound card. Then maybe the OS will abstract that away and your app just hands it off so it can do the right thing. And then maybe the hardware will abstract that away so the OS can talk one standard like USB audio. But all of this is a work in progress that's constantly expanded because we want hardware or software to do new things. Maybe we want hardware mixing or don't want to play sound on this machine but pipe it somewhere else over the network.
What you are asking for is essentially like every other attempt at cross hardware/platform development ever. Write C, no more hardware-specific assembler. Don't write for 3dfx, matrox, nVidia, write for DirectX or OpenGL. Write Java, write once run everywhere. There's many reasons we move in that direction. There's also many reasons we sometimes move in the other direction, like now with Vulkan we're basically scaling back OpenGL and saying game engines use this low level interface instead of the abstractions because they're holding you back.
For starters, the only bird type that can hover in one spot is the Hummingbird. If you see a large bird hovering perfectly still in one spot, you can bet your ass it's a drone.
Well if you bothered to properly disguise your drone as a bird I'm sure you'd have a program to fly in gentle circles like a bird searching for pray to "hover" over an area. Otherwise it'd be kinda obvious.