Tax benefits, hospital visitation, inheritance issues, insurance costs...and on, and on, and on.
FYI that won't be enough in the long run. We had that in Norway from 1993 to 2009, homosexuals could register as "partners" but not "married" but had equal rights in all of the above, though adoption was kept out of it. Despite being quite equal in law there was a strong emotion on both sides from homosexuals that felt their love wasn't regarded as equal and from fundamentalists who were quick to point out that this was not to be understood as marriage. So in our current law there is marriage and only marriage, regardless of sex.
Finally, cross-platform development has brought its own cancers to the PC side. I could have a bad encounter with a table saw and still be able to count on one hand how many AAA games released in the past two years allow for dedicated servers. (...) dedicated servers were a standard component for multiplayer PC games for over a decade, but are now an endangered species. Games used to frequently ship with level editors and modding kits, that allowed for new characters and maps to be community created (DLC used to be DIY, and free). Again, this is a highly exceptional state of affairs now, and I'm patently unconvinced it's a positive direction for PC gaming.
I'm quite sure the first one got nothing to do with being "cross-platform" and everything do with control. The market that doesn't have an always-on/cheap/reliable Internet connection has dwindled to the point where they don't care and by tying everything to central services they have control both over piracy and swinging the ban hammer. Any major organized LAN party will have a fat pipe to the Internet, heck if I wanted to pay $1750/month I could have 10 Gbps fiber at home today. I'd agree more with modding, there consoles have pretty strongly pushed the "one gaming experience for everyone" model. That said, not many games have the simple "LEGO block" model where you can just puzzle things together and have it work anymore. I do remember the games that had it, but I also remember the limitations and many games that didn't but were fun then and there even though they lacked the replay value.
But not by being "pro homeopathy" and generally come across like crackpots. Sigh. We need some real alternatives to Republicans and Democrats. "Real" being the key word.
The more I read about US politics, the more I realize that what would ordinarily be normal parties here in Norway are the factions within the democrats and republicans, while the fringe crackpots are the same. Imagine a system with:
Democratic Party Liberal Party Socialist Party Republican Party Tea Party Christian Party Libertarian Party Green Party Constitution Party
It would be not entirely unlike our parliament. Anything above 4% nationally gets proportional representation (19/169 representatives are held in a pool for this purpose), under 4% you'd have to get a direct vote from your area (the other 150/169). Coalitions are common and usually center around the main "left" or "right" party but who is in and who is out varies. In the US you have the same factions but first they make a red and blue coalition that they call a party, then they put it to a vote.
As long as you got a "first past the post" system, nothing matters unless you get a majority so first you must become part of something that could get a majority, then you can try pulling it in the direction you want. That's why we see candidates like Sanders, Trump, Ron Paul etc. join the main parties even if they're way on the fringes. Nobody's going to be able to change that without changing the electorate system and the keys to that is firmly locked up by the two parties that like their pseudo-monopoly on being the red and blue pill.
Intel is no doubt in search of a new area of focus. So that could change. Intel will probably not want to license technology from AMD, but they might at some point buy AMD and chop it up for parts.
Intel doesn't want AMD to actually fail, just be failing like they've been the last decade. If nobody else could supply x86 processors they'd have to work a lot harder to avoid anti-trust problems. The console business is low margin, you can tell that by AMDs financials despite powering every console of this generation and not at all the kind of market Intel is looking for. Heck, at this point I'm not surprised if they intentionally priced themselves out of the Playstation Neo / Xbox Scorpio to keep AMD on life support. They can read quarterly earnings reports as well as anybody, Thursday we'll see their Q2 results and I expect them to be circling the drain this quarter too. The RX 480 looks like it might put food on the table but that won't be until Q3.
And even if Zen is a massive success, AMD is still so on the ropes it'll take a long time to recover. What Intel would like is the phone/tablet/convertible space but for once the WinTel combo has failed and Apple/Google don't need x86, not sure what direction Intel's heading but tablet sales have fallen and PCs rebounded lately so it might not be that urgent anyway. Particularly since the plans for ARM servers seem to have lost steam, Intel is still making bank selling Xeons. They're clearly a bit on the defensive, but hey... I'd be more worried about the console companies themselves as they start to mimic PCs more and more. Well maybe not Microsoft as they have the PC gaming market but Sony and Nintendo, at this point unless they have a real winner I think Nintendo should concentrate on software like Pokemon Go. Yes, using Super Mario to sell consoles worked a while but I think they'd do just as well selling it for its own sake.
No, you certainly are not a graphics expert. I am not either, but at least I know that scenes are not composed and rendered for each pixel. So, when you go from 1080p to 720p which has 2.25 times less pixels, you never get 2.25 times more frame rate.
Probably because there's some kind of setup time/synchronization between different types of rendering passes. But if you think of a 3840x2160 image as four 1920x1080 quadrants you'd think each step would take roughly 4x to do with the same level of detail. Just grabbing a few benchmarks from Anandtech, Dirt Rally (DX11):
1920*1080*132 = 274 million pixels/s 2560*1440*91 = 335 million pixels/s 3840*2160*49 = 406 million pixels/s
Clearly there's some scaling here, if it can render four quadrants at 49 fps ideally it should be able to render one at 49*4 = 196 fps. So if we take 132/196 = 2/3 as a rough number for the scaling benefit it should probably take around 4*2/3 = 2.7 times the horsepower to go from 1080p60 to 2160p60. Same setup/synchronization overhead, 4x runtime on each part, I'm sure you could try doing a linear regression and use Amdahl's law to see if this makes sense. Now I'm making a ton of assumptions here, but from my napkin calculations it doesn't look all that bad.
Fantastic! But they are *humanely* slaughtered, right?
Due to religious rules (halal/kosher) quite possibly not. Though a few countries like here in Norway have a total ban on all non-stunned slaughter, but many others have exceptions including the US. Fortunately we didn't let religious dogma get in the way of animal welfare, I understand the whole "freedom of religion" but those practices don't stand above the law.
Doing nothing is preferable to lashing out like a scared toddler.
Not if you're a politician, people will vote for a leader that takes resolute action over someone that shrugs and says live with it any day. Whether it actually helps doesn't matter, that's why you see security theater and such.
Historically, the "good" ones are silent when Islamist terrorists act. How many mosques have you seen speak out against ISIS and Islamist terrorism?
You do realize that the vast majority of the land that they have conquered was already Muslim? They wouldn't need to do that, if they were on the same side. If you're asking why they don't fight back or start a popular uprising, it's a regime of terror by religious fanatics who've consistently shown there's no end to their savagery. What do you think happens to those who resist? Easy for you to say they should get themselves and their family tortured, slaughtered and heads put on a stake.
That's not to say the rest are all good, mosques want to spread Islam and there's a lot of shitty values that don't mix well with democracy, equality of the sexes, freedom of speech and so on. But they want to it by propaganda and mass slaughter of innocents isn't very likely to bring converts. Terror is an attempt by IS to cause anti-Muslim sentiments so the 99,99% of Muslims that aren't part of IS will join them. I'm sure you can read the book and discuss who is the "real" Islam all day, but in practice Islamic countries haven't been this intolerant of religious minorities for a very, very long time.
I know one person with WP, I think the winning feature for him was the camera as apparently Nokia's hardware division does something right. But I don't think he's a trendsetter, to put it that way...
Reality is that the attacker was stopped by the first man with a firearm. Reality is that automatic and semi-automatic gun ownership just got another solid, not even a theoretical card, to use when defending the gun ownership from nutty gun fearing zealots. Reality is that a single semi-automatic rifle would have been extremely effective in stopping the madman in Nice attack.
If he had an automatic rifle, would he need a truck? Just spray and pray, when it's packed with people you're going to hit somebody. And if you pull a gun, are you a terrorist or a good guy? During that police shooting in Dallas, you had 20-30 open carry activists in the crowd. How many of them pulled out their guns to try help shoot the bad guy? I'm guessing none, because they wanted to live. I'm sure there were many police officers along that parade, as France is still in a state of emergency. That doesn't mean firing into the driver's seat of a truck that's ramming through a crowd would be easy. If you look at that truck it was riddled with bullet holes, it took a lot more than one bullet to bring him down...
Well, I do feel/. should try to put a nerd/tech spin on things and not be just another general news source but it requires some tact and delicacy to not come across as "oh and 84 people died too". Maybe something like:
"Bastille Day terror in Nice, Alert App warns three hours later" "Last night a man drove a truck into a crowded seaside promenade during Bastille Day celebrations in Nice, killing at least 84 people and leaving 18 others in critical condition. The attacker was killed after a firefight with police after about two kilometers. A terror alert app released by the French government last month has come under criticism after taking hours to notify users of the attack. The app, called SAIP was released by the French Interior Ministry on iOS and Android in June, ahead of the Euro 2016 soccer tournament. According to the ministry, the app would provide users with alerts and information within 15 minutes of a terrorist attack being confirmed. But users who had downloaded the app posted phone screenshots to Twitter last night showing that SAIP sent out its first alert just after 1:30 AM local time, nearly three hours after the attack began. Facebook, by contrast, activated its Safety Check feature shortly after the attack was carried out, and French politicians urged those in the area to check in using that feature as SAIP remained silent."
Still not a smooth transition as I heard the truck was moving at 30-40km/h so 2 km would be 3-4 minutes? While the lack of information certainly might have added to the chaos and confusion, I don't think it'd have any practical effect on the outcome in this particular case. In fact, I'm not sure how much good it'll do in any case as for the most part the explosions and gunfire will be all the relevant warning the people in the immediate vicinity need. I guess if there's multiple attackers and one of them screws up early then it might give some advance warning, but really all they have to do is agree on a time. I mean it's not like there's an actual order of events that needs coordination, they just want to go postal at roughly the same time.
Smoking doesn't kill... except for those one out of every three smokers who die from a smoking related illness.
Well apart from lung cancer most smoking related deaths are failures of the circulatory/respiratory system which is what kills most other people too, just a little quicker with that crap in your lungs and veins. Since we're all going to die the interesting metric is really how much sooner, the answer is about a decade. In fact some people who've done the math on public pensions, healthcare and such have questioned whether or not smoking actually costs money or saves money since by far most smokers get through their tax years fine and die early so society won't have to take care of them so long. But that is of course politically most incorrect to mention, long healthy lives are what is desirable whether the individual agrees or not.
Except when you hear Musk talk, it hardly sounds like the Autopilot will change name between now and becoming self-driving. He talks as if this is their automatic driver but since it's still in beta wait just a little bit longer to take your hands off the wheel. When in fact it's much closer to the adaptive cruise control/lane keeping etc. that other cars have had than to Google's car project. Sure the legal disclaimers are all there but very often they disclaim anything and everything just to be on the safe side.
Not worth it for most people but photographers and image sites might save a lot of money using this.
I would think most serious photographers keep the RAW files which are much bigger and will dominate their storage. And even MP monsters only produce ~20MB jpegs so ~200,000 photos on a $99 4TB drive. Pretty sure you won't bother with this unless you're Dropbox, Facebook or some other big image site with many, many millions of photos.
The EU law was to insist that they would work at a mere 200C which is of course inane because most domestic ovens reach 250. But that wasn't the cause of complaint. No, the complaint was that British manufactuers would have to stop selling oven gloves that wouldn't be safe even as low as 200C. It came as a bit of a shock that it was actually legal to sell oven gloves that can't be safely used to take stuff out of a normal oven. Apparently the EU are evil for wanting to stop manufacturers salling blatently substsandard goods.
Ye gods, I've taken things out of the oven with completely ordinary kitchen towels. Even after a really long time meat in the oven will only have a core temperature of 80C even if the air is 200C, only the metal will come close and the thin wire/sheet metal doesn't store that much heat so it'll drop way below that before it can heat the gloves 150C+. The only time you're likely to hit 200C is if you drop your oven mitt into a frying pan just as you're about to sear the meat and leave it there for several seconds. For any ordinary use they'll get too warm on the inside long before they reach any critical temperature on the outside.
The reason you have 200C as a standard for commerical mitts is that you have professional pizza ovens and such that operate at 4-500C where there's a real risk the outside might reach 200C before you realize it. Professional steak houses also typically have super hot pans to give that quick, thin exterior searing in the same range. So a glove that'll work at half the oven's temperature will do just fine, but then again the cost difference is marginal. They probably just found it was a waste to have "domestic" and "commercial" class gloves which might lead to some cheapening out, others gouging their professional product. A quick local price check suggests I can get an approved 200C+ glove for $3, so whatever.
I guess most of the "harm" the ransomware cause is to them. They simply make less money now that this reputation is out. Making less money means having less money. Having less money means they can't afford buying stuff like hacked computer access or paying programmers. Means they'll go out of business pretty soon. Only those malware authors survive which actually pay back the ransom.
No, this is the problem with counterfeits. If "customers" of ransomware can't tell the difference between ransomware that'll return their files and those that'll don't - which I would think is a safe assumption than they don't - it'll hurt all "vendors" in the market equally. And if those who don't bother to have a decryption system operate at a lower cost/risk and thus higher margin they'll leech off the established "brand" while destroying it. Heck if I recall correctly there was one such ransomware that didn't bother doing anything at all, it simply told the customers their files was locked and some people paid simply on that belief. You're already dealing with criminals here, adding fraud to blackmail doesn't bother them.
Do the people who write this software have ANY sort of moral compass? Are they complete sociopaths? Using encrypted files as blackmail is bad enough, but just deleting someones personal files altogether is just sick.
Oh, these people aren't even close to the top of the sociopath scale. This is just the "make profit on faceless victims, haven't met them and don't give a shit" level like owning a sweatshop or slave plantation. The true sociopaths see your pain and suffering and still don't give a shit like rapists and serial killers. Or worse yet, thrive on it. Heck, I'd say these guys don't even reach the level of Nigeria scammers that'll rob you blind and put you in debt for life. Sure, in Internet hyperbole I'd like them in front of an execution squad along with all the other spammers, frauds and malware authors but I'd still reserve a few circles of hell for the truly nasty people. And while they're maybe one a in million, these garden variety sociopaths are maybe one in a thousand so multiply by 7 billion. There will be a few...
Broadcast TV with this stuff on has considerable latency. It looks at the next frame and then interpolates its way there, might work reasonably well to watch a recorded show but would be pretty horrible for real time motion from VR. Next question?
If you can't trust this thing to detect that it's attempting to run over something like a child, can you trust it to accurately detect and report that a crime is in progress?
Honestly it sounds like a slightly mobile burglar alarm that can detect motion (infrared) and glass breaking (microphones), my guess is it doesn't do anything worth anything in the daytime except look cool. But hey, too cool not to show off right?
That might not have been the actual check, for example it might have been:
WHERE branch_code <= '088' OR branch_code >= '101'
Just to make it explicit that yes, we did intend to exclude '089' AND '100'. I tend to prefer it that way if the boundaries are somewhat arbitrary, unless it's about dates where <= '2015-12-31' and < '2016-01-01' aren't the same when implicitly converting to a time stamp. Like '2015-12-31T12:34:56' <= '2015-12-31' = false, '2015-12-31T12:34:56' < '2016-01-01' = true.
Sure, my first born... *laugh* then click "suuuuuuuure I accept", if they made some plausible sounding but ominous legalese they might have had some people refuse.
That's just it, drugs generally do really bad things to people and those around them and many are helpless to break the cycle of dependency. Would you have us stand back and watch while people self destruct, killing themselves a little bit at a time?
I'd be more inclined to agree with you if it was treated more like an illness and less like a crime. Criminalization might be good for those who choose to stay away from drugs because it is against the law, but it does nothing for the people actually using drugs. In fact, it makes everything worse. Don't tell me the effects of smoking a little pot is worse than the effects of being arrested for smoking pot, because it's just not true. Sure, it takes a lot of courage to go to an AA meeting and say you have an alcohol problem but I think it takes even more to say you have a drug problem. Same goes for clean, consistent quality - that street drugs may have all sorts of bad shit in them might scare some away, but it only makes it more dangerous for the actual users.
By far most people who are really fucked up on drugs and get real destructive to those around them have some really bad shit in their past they want to get away from, this "gateway drug" theory is only looking at the steps not why people really take them. I read this story recently about a girl (17) who was now in rehab, started smoking pot at 12 and shot heroin at 14. Sure A followed B but if you listened even a little bit to her life's story you'd know she was ready to jump on any high to get away from the past. The vast, vast majority without psychological trauma will puff a little joint and get a buzz and that was it. Then there's a few with addictive personalities who can get addicted to anything from work and sex to gambling and drugs, but fuck it we're adults. I want to life my life even though you can't control yours.
Great idea... let's also make the phone company responsible for what everyone talks about on the phone. I can't really tell if you're a troll, shill or just retarded but there's nothing wrong with Google's business model. If they manage to choke Google, it'll be the end of user supplied content as we know it - as was the point all along. How long do you think it'll take/. editors to review every comment in case somebody posted something copyrighted without permission? Particularly when there's no centralized archive over all that is copyrighted or who has granted rights under miscellaneous licenses. Sure, a lot of things are well known and would be flagged but they'd never know the long tail of no-name bands who may or may not have given their music away for free.
Linus got an abundance of coders and by far most are paid, you can't compare it to other projects where you're lucky to get volunters at all. The kernel runs everything from cell phones to supercomputers and the markets it doesn't dominate is not the kernel's fault. He can well afford to only take high quality code that follows the style guides. Linux is simply not like most projects.
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Tax benefits, hospital visitation, inheritance issues, insurance costs...and on, and on, and on.
FYI that won't be enough in the long run. We had that in Norway from 1993 to 2009, homosexuals could register as "partners" but not "married" but had equal rights in all of the above, though adoption was kept out of it. Despite being quite equal in law there was a strong emotion on both sides from homosexuals that felt their love wasn't regarded as equal and from fundamentalists who were quick to point out that this was not to be understood as marriage. So in our current law there is marriage and only marriage, regardless of sex.
Finally, cross-platform development has brought its own cancers to the PC side. I could have a bad encounter with a table saw and still be able to count on one hand how many AAA games released in the past two years allow for dedicated servers. (...) dedicated servers were a standard component for multiplayer PC games for over a decade, but are now an endangered species. Games used to frequently ship with level editors and modding kits, that allowed for new characters and maps to be community created (DLC used to be DIY, and free). Again, this is a highly exceptional state of affairs now, and I'm patently unconvinced it's a positive direction for PC gaming.
I'm quite sure the first one got nothing to do with being "cross-platform" and everything do with control. The market that doesn't have an always-on/cheap/reliable Internet connection has dwindled to the point where they don't care and by tying everything to central services they have control both over piracy and swinging the ban hammer. Any major organized LAN party will have a fat pipe to the Internet, heck if I wanted to pay $1750/month I could have 10 Gbps fiber at home today. I'd agree more with modding, there consoles have pretty strongly pushed the "one gaming experience for everyone" model. That said, not many games have the simple "LEGO block" model where you can just puzzle things together and have it work anymore. I do remember the games that had it, but I also remember the limitations and many games that didn't but were fun then and there even though they lacked the replay value.
But not by being "pro homeopathy" and generally come across like crackpots. Sigh. We need some real alternatives to Republicans and Democrats. "Real" being the key word.
The more I read about US politics, the more I realize that what would ordinarily be normal parties here in Norway are the factions within the democrats and republicans, while the fringe crackpots are the same. Imagine a system with:
Democratic Party
Liberal Party
Socialist Party
Republican Party
Tea Party
Christian Party
Libertarian Party
Green Party
Constitution Party
It would be not entirely unlike our parliament. Anything above 4% nationally gets proportional representation (19/169 representatives are held in a pool for this purpose), under 4% you'd have to get a direct vote from your area (the other 150/169). Coalitions are common and usually center around the main "left" or "right" party but who is in and who is out varies. In the US you have the same factions but first they make a red and blue coalition that they call a party, then they put it to a vote.
As long as you got a "first past the post" system, nothing matters unless you get a majority so first you must become part of something that could get a majority, then you can try pulling it in the direction you want. That's why we see candidates like Sanders, Trump, Ron Paul etc. join the main parties even if they're way on the fringes. Nobody's going to be able to change that without changing the electorate system and the keys to that is firmly locked up by the two parties that like their pseudo-monopoly on being the red and blue pill.
Intel is no doubt in search of a new area of focus. So that could change. Intel will probably not want to license technology from AMD, but they might at some point buy AMD and chop it up for parts.
Intel doesn't want AMD to actually fail, just be failing like they've been the last decade. If nobody else could supply x86 processors they'd have to work a lot harder to avoid anti-trust problems. The console business is low margin, you can tell that by AMDs financials despite powering every console of this generation and not at all the kind of market Intel is looking for. Heck, at this point I'm not surprised if they intentionally priced themselves out of the Playstation Neo / Xbox Scorpio to keep AMD on life support. They can read quarterly earnings reports as well as anybody, Thursday we'll see their Q2 results and I expect them to be circling the drain this quarter too. The RX 480 looks like it might put food on the table but that won't be until Q3.
And even if Zen is a massive success, AMD is still so on the ropes it'll take a long time to recover. What Intel would like is the phone/tablet/convertible space but for once the WinTel combo has failed and Apple/Google don't need x86, not sure what direction Intel's heading but tablet sales have fallen and PCs rebounded lately so it might not be that urgent anyway. Particularly since the plans for ARM servers seem to have lost steam, Intel is still making bank selling Xeons. They're clearly a bit on the defensive, but hey... I'd be more worried about the console companies themselves as they start to mimic PCs more and more. Well maybe not Microsoft as they have the PC gaming market but Sony and Nintendo, at this point unless they have a real winner I think Nintendo should concentrate on software like Pokemon Go. Yes, using Super Mario to sell consoles worked a while but I think they'd do just as well selling it for its own sake.
No, you certainly are not a graphics expert. I am not either, but at least I know that scenes are not composed and rendered for each pixel. So, when you go from 1080p to 720p which has 2.25 times less pixels, you never get 2.25 times more frame rate.
Probably because there's some kind of setup time/synchronization between different types of rendering passes. But if you think of a 3840x2160 image as four 1920x1080 quadrants you'd think each step would take roughly 4x to do with the same level of detail. Just grabbing a few benchmarks from Anandtech, Dirt Rally (DX11):
1920*1080*132 = 274 million pixels/s
2560*1440*91 = 335 million pixels/s
3840*2160*49 = 406 million pixels/s
Clearly there's some scaling here, if it can render four quadrants at 49 fps ideally it should be able to render one at 49*4 = 196 fps. So if we take 132/196 = 2/3 as a rough number for the scaling benefit it should probably take around 4*2/3 = 2.7 times the horsepower to go from 1080p60 to 2160p60. Same setup/synchronization overhead, 4x runtime on each part, I'm sure you could try doing a linear regression and use Amdahl's law to see if this makes sense. Now I'm making a ton of assumptions here, but from my napkin calculations it doesn't look all that bad.
Fantastic! But they are *humanely* slaughtered, right?
Due to religious rules (halal/kosher) quite possibly not. Though a few countries like here in Norway have a total ban on all non-stunned slaughter, but many others have exceptions including the US. Fortunately we didn't let religious dogma get in the way of animal welfare, I understand the whole "freedom of religion" but those practices don't stand above the law.
Doing nothing is preferable to lashing out like a scared toddler.
Not if you're a politician, people will vote for a leader that takes resolute action over someone that shrugs and says live with it any day. Whether it actually helps doesn't matter, that's why you see security theater and such.
Turkey has had a few coups. Since NATO? Isn't nominal democracy a condition for NATO membership?
I think the formula you're looking for is: !communist. During the cold war it was "he's a bastard, but he's our bastard" rules.
Historically, the "good" ones are silent when Islamist terrorists act. How many mosques have you seen speak out against ISIS and Islamist terrorism?
You do realize that the vast majority of the land that they have conquered was already Muslim? They wouldn't need to do that, if they were on the same side. If you're asking why they don't fight back or start a popular uprising, it's a regime of terror by religious fanatics who've consistently shown there's no end to their savagery. What do you think happens to those who resist? Easy for you to say they should get themselves and their family tortured, slaughtered and heads put on a stake.
That's not to say the rest are all good, mosques want to spread Islam and there's a lot of shitty values that don't mix well with democracy, equality of the sexes, freedom of speech and so on. But they want to it by propaganda and mass slaughter of innocents isn't very likely to bring converts. Terror is an attempt by IS to cause anti-Muslim sentiments so the 99,99% of Muslims that aren't part of IS will join them. I'm sure you can read the book and discuss who is the "real" Islam all day, but in practice Islamic countries haven't been this intolerant of religious minorities for a very, very long time.
I know one person with WP, I think the winning feature for him was the camera as apparently Nokia's hardware division does something right. But I don't think he's a trendsetter, to put it that way...
Reality is that the attacker was stopped by the first man with a firearm. Reality is that automatic and semi-automatic gun ownership just got another solid, not even a theoretical card, to use when defending the gun ownership from nutty gun fearing zealots. Reality is that a single semi-automatic rifle would have been extremely effective in stopping the madman in Nice attack.
If he had an automatic rifle, would he need a truck? Just spray and pray, when it's packed with people you're going to hit somebody. And if you pull a gun, are you a terrorist or a good guy? During that police shooting in Dallas, you had 20-30 open carry activists in the crowd. How many of them pulled out their guns to try help shoot the bad guy? I'm guessing none, because they wanted to live. I'm sure there were many police officers along that parade, as France is still in a state of emergency. That doesn't mean firing into the driver's seat of a truck that's ramming through a crowd would be easy. If you look at that truck it was riddled with bullet holes, it took a lot more than one bullet to bring him down...
Well, I do feel /. should try to put a nerd/tech spin on things and not be just another general news source but it requires some tact and delicacy to not come across as "oh and 84 people died too". Maybe something like:
"Bastille Day terror in Nice, Alert App warns three hours later"
"Last night a man drove a truck into a crowded seaside promenade during Bastille Day celebrations in Nice, killing at least 84 people and leaving 18 others in critical condition. The attacker was killed after a firefight with police after about two kilometers. A terror alert app released by the French government last month has come under criticism after taking hours to notify users of the attack. The app, called SAIP was released by the French Interior Ministry on iOS and Android in June, ahead of the Euro 2016 soccer tournament. According to the ministry, the app would provide users with alerts and information within 15 minutes of a terrorist attack being confirmed. But users who had downloaded the app posted phone screenshots to Twitter last night showing that SAIP sent out its first alert just after 1:30 AM local time, nearly three hours after the attack began. Facebook, by contrast, activated its Safety Check feature shortly after the attack was carried out, and French politicians urged those in the area to check in using that feature as SAIP remained silent."
Still not a smooth transition as I heard the truck was moving at 30-40km/h so 2 km would be 3-4 minutes? While the lack of information certainly might have added to the chaos and confusion, I don't think it'd have any practical effect on the outcome in this particular case. In fact, I'm not sure how much good it'll do in any case as for the most part the explosions and gunfire will be all the relevant warning the people in the immediate vicinity need. I guess if there's multiple attackers and one of them screws up early then it might give some advance warning, but really all they have to do is agree on a time. I mean it's not like there's an actual order of events that needs coordination, they just want to go postal at roughly the same time.
Smoking doesn't kill... except for those one out of every three smokers who die from a smoking related illness.
Well apart from lung cancer most smoking related deaths are failures of the circulatory/respiratory system which is what kills most other people too, just a little quicker with that crap in your lungs and veins. Since we're all going to die the interesting metric is really how much sooner, the answer is about a decade. In fact some people who've done the math on public pensions, healthcare and such have questioned whether or not smoking actually costs money or saves money since by far most smokers get through their tax years fine and die early so society won't have to take care of them so long. But that is of course politically most incorrect to mention, long healthy lives are what is desirable whether the individual agrees or not.
Except when you hear Musk talk, it hardly sounds like the Autopilot will change name between now and becoming self-driving. He talks as if this is their automatic driver but since it's still in beta wait just a little bit longer to take your hands off the wheel. When in fact it's much closer to the adaptive cruise control/lane keeping etc. that other cars have had than to Google's car project. Sure the legal disclaimers are all there but very often they disclaim anything and everything just to be on the safe side.
Not worth it for most people but photographers and image sites might save a lot of money using this.
I would think most serious photographers keep the RAW files which are much bigger and will dominate their storage. And even MP monsters only produce ~20MB jpegs so ~200,000 photos on a $99 4TB drive. Pretty sure you won't bother with this unless you're Dropbox, Facebook or some other big image site with many, many millions of photos.
The EU law was to insist that they would work at a mere 200C which is of course inane because most domestic ovens reach 250. But that wasn't the cause of complaint. No, the complaint was that British manufactuers would have to stop selling oven gloves that wouldn't be safe even as low as 200C. It came as a bit of a shock that it was actually legal to sell oven gloves that can't be safely used to take stuff out of a normal oven. Apparently the EU are evil for wanting to stop manufacturers salling blatently substsandard goods.
Ye gods, I've taken things out of the oven with completely ordinary kitchen towels. Even after a really long time meat in the oven will only have a core temperature of 80C even if the air is 200C, only the metal will come close and the thin wire/sheet metal doesn't store that much heat so it'll drop way below that before it can heat the gloves 150C+. The only time you're likely to hit 200C is if you drop your oven mitt into a frying pan just as you're about to sear the meat and leave it there for several seconds. For any ordinary use they'll get too warm on the inside long before they reach any critical temperature on the outside.
The reason you have 200C as a standard for commerical mitts is that you have professional pizza ovens and such that operate at 4-500C where there's a real risk the outside might reach 200C before you realize it. Professional steak houses also typically have super hot pans to give that quick, thin exterior searing in the same range. So a glove that'll work at half the oven's temperature will do just fine, but then again the cost difference is marginal. They probably just found it was a waste to have "domestic" and "commercial" class gloves which might lead to some cheapening out, others gouging their professional product. A quick local price check suggests I can get an approved 200C+ glove for $3, so whatever.
I guess most of the "harm" the ransomware cause is to them. They simply make less money now that this reputation is out. Making less money means having less money. Having less money means they can't afford buying stuff like hacked computer access or paying programmers. Means they'll go out of business pretty soon. Only those malware authors survive which actually pay back the ransom.
No, this is the problem with counterfeits. If "customers" of ransomware can't tell the difference between ransomware that'll return their files and those that'll don't - which I would think is a safe assumption than they don't - it'll hurt all "vendors" in the market equally. And if those who don't bother to have a decryption system operate at a lower cost/risk and thus higher margin they'll leech off the established "brand" while destroying it. Heck if I recall correctly there was one such ransomware that didn't bother doing anything at all, it simply told the customers their files was locked and some people paid simply on that belief. You're already dealing with criminals here, adding fraud to blackmail doesn't bother them.
Do the people who write this software have ANY sort of moral compass? Are they complete sociopaths? Using encrypted files as blackmail is bad enough, but just deleting someones personal files altogether is just sick.
Oh, these people aren't even close to the top of the sociopath scale. This is just the "make profit on faceless victims, haven't met them and don't give a shit" level like owning a sweatshop or slave plantation. The true sociopaths see your pain and suffering and still don't give a shit like rapists and serial killers. Or worse yet, thrive on it. Heck, I'd say these guys don't even reach the level of Nigeria scammers that'll rob you blind and put you in debt for life. Sure, in Internet hyperbole I'd like them in front of an execution squad along with all the other spammers, frauds and malware authors but I'd still reserve a few circles of hell for the truly nasty people. And while they're maybe one a in million, these garden variety sociopaths are maybe one in a thousand so multiply by 7 billion. There will be a few...
Broadcast TV with this stuff on has considerable latency. It looks at the next frame and then interpolates its way there, might work reasonably well to watch a recorded show but would be pretty horrible for real time motion from VR. Next question?
If you can't trust this thing to detect that it's attempting to run over something like a child, can you trust it to accurately detect and report that a crime is in progress?
Honestly it sounds like a slightly mobile burglar alarm that can detect motion (infrared) and glass breaking (microphones), my guess is it doesn't do anything worth anything in the daytime except look cool. But hey, too cool not to show off right?
That might not have been the actual check, for example it might have been:
WHERE branch_code <= '088' OR branch_code >= '101'
Just to make it explicit that yes, we did intend to exclude '089' AND '100'. I tend to prefer it that way if the boundaries are somewhat arbitrary, unless it's about dates where <= '2015-12-31' and < '2016-01-01' aren't the same when implicitly converting to a time stamp. Like '2015-12-31T12:34:56' <= '2015-12-31' = false, '2015-12-31T12:34:56' < '2016-01-01' = true.
Sure, my first born... *laugh* then click "suuuuuuuure I accept", if they made some plausible sounding but ominous legalese they might have had some people refuse.
That's just it, drugs generally do really bad things to people and those around them and many are helpless to break the cycle of dependency. Would you have us stand back and watch while people self destruct, killing themselves a little bit at a time?
I'd be more inclined to agree with you if it was treated more like an illness and less like a crime. Criminalization might be good for those who choose to stay away from drugs because it is against the law, but it does nothing for the people actually using drugs. In fact, it makes everything worse. Don't tell me the effects of smoking a little pot is worse than the effects of being arrested for smoking pot, because it's just not true. Sure, it takes a lot of courage to go to an AA meeting and say you have an alcohol problem but I think it takes even more to say you have a drug problem. Same goes for clean, consistent quality - that street drugs may have all sorts of bad shit in them might scare some away, but it only makes it more dangerous for the actual users.
By far most people who are really fucked up on drugs and get real destructive to those around them have some really bad shit in their past they want to get away from, this "gateway drug" theory is only looking at the steps not why people really take them. I read this story recently about a girl (17) who was now in rehab, started smoking pot at 12 and shot heroin at 14. Sure A followed B but if you listened even a little bit to her life's story you'd know she was ready to jump on any high to get away from the past. The vast, vast majority without psychological trauma will puff a little joint and get a buzz and that was it. Then there's a few with addictive personalities who can get addicted to anything from work and sex to gambling and drugs, but fuck it we're adults. I want to life my life even though you can't control yours.
Great idea... let's also make the phone company responsible for what everyone talks about on the phone. I can't really tell if you're a troll, shill or just retarded but there's nothing wrong with Google's business model. If they manage to choke Google, it'll be the end of user supplied content as we know it - as was the point all along. How long do you think it'll take /. editors to review every comment in case somebody posted something copyrighted without permission? Particularly when there's no centralized archive over all that is copyrighted or who has granted rights under miscellaneous licenses. Sure, a lot of things are well known and would be flagged but they'd never know the long tail of no-name bands who may or may not have given their music away for free.
Linus got an abundance of coders and by far most are paid, you can't compare it to other projects where you're lucky to get volunters at all. The kernel runs everything from cell phones to supercomputers and the markets it doesn't dominate is not the kernel's fault. He can well afford to only take high quality code that follows the style guides. Linux is simply not like most projects.