Lately they're going for all these crazy niches and "next big things" that usually works out to either being a flop or if it's big, then nVidia can just stroll in from behind with a product once the market is mature. Like an ITX size 175W graphics card and so on. Even when they "win" like with Mantle nobody really cares until it becomes a standard like DirectX12 or Vulkan. Like this, I'm sure AMD will use a ton of money on the standardization effort, then nVidia will come and say "that's neat, here's Maxwell/Pascal in a box" and walk away with 80%+ of the market AMD built up.
And for all those hoping for VR to save the day, it rode the 3D TV hype wave. Now consumers have mostly rejected it and 4K is all the rage, people don't like wearing glasses and helmets even less. And Google Glass totally failed to make the cyborg look seem cool. I think the people behind it sold out to Facebook at just the right time and really... it's a $599 accessory for people with a $1000+ computer, that should be a hint. AMD won't recover until they get back to making good CPUs/GPUs and stop flailing around from one hare-brained scheme to the next.
I'm guessing it'll be like the SOX act in US law where the CFO gets to sign a statement these fiscal numbers are accurate or I could go to jail for 20 years. How is he to know that? Not the lawmaker's problem. It's the company itself that must find good enough compliance mechanisms.
Information that is "Top Secret" is born classified. Removing markings, headers, footers etc. doesn't change the classified nature of it. If you measure what was done with her server (leaving it in her hands to sift through at her leisure, turning over only that which she felt like doing and then wiping the rest) with what happens to ANYONE else when they are even suspected of breaking clearance rules...
Only in the land of fairies and unicorns. Information is born and everyone with a classification is supposed to submit it to a original certification authority that'll determine what, if any, classification status it'll get. Primarily it's the one who creates this information but secondarily everyone who receives it also has an independent duty to get any information they think is classified reviewed. From what I gather a lot of people sent information to Clinton's server that has been retroactively classified, meaning those who sent it didn't do their job. The accusations are so far as I can tell that Clinton should have recognized some of this information as obviously classified, so she didn't do her job either.
I'd be much more interested to hear if there's any accusations of mishandling actual, pre-classified information. It's one thing to say that you could have, should have, maybe seen this was classified it's quite another to be reckless about content that's clearly marked secret/top secret. If they can prove that, they might have an actual case against her. If it's only a case of omission as a recipient of information that ought to be classified, that doesn't seem like that big a deal.
Base libraries like these are often widely used but everybody assumes somebody else has done the code reviews and exploit testing. It took some major exploits like heartbleed to make people realize that OpenSSL was understaffed, full of cruft and really far from the ideal crypto library. Yes, in this case it was a downgrade exploit to an export cipher. That doesn't mean the US government is generally at fault for downgrade attacks, it's poor coding. That a library might have support for old yet known flawed protocols/algorithms for compatibility is a reasonable feature, but the handshake is supposed to verify the client and server connected in the best possible way. But it's so much easier to blame somebody else.
There are plenty of good arguments to be made for moving the math curiculum to statistics, combinatorics and other areas, but "making more people pass the exam" isn't one of them.
I think there's a big difference between general education and specialized education. I mean if you gave that high school test to fifth graders and they mostly flunked you wouldn't say they're too dumb and should be held back you'd say the test was too hard. In a general education you put what the general population of average intelligence and with average effort can understand and adjust your expectations accordingly, flunking should really just be for those that don't really try, have given up, are borderline mentally challenged or otherwise are showing little to no results from being in class.
Specialized education is a different story, you must understand this much math to become a structural engineer. You must understand this much medicine before we let you become a doctor. You must understand this much law before we let you become a lawyer. And if you have to lower the expectations, well you have more of a gap to cover. Or that it's some form of elective that those who want to go into that branch should take or else they end up with extra classes just to get to the starting line. There's good reasons to have "weed-out" classes in specialized education, but unless you want people to just give up and start flipping burgers at McD I don't see any reason to set arbitrarily high standards to create dropouts in general education.
Just as I resumed reading, the damn ad once again scrolled me away from where I was and started playing the video again. After a few cycles of this bullshit, I decided to install an ad blocker and then went back to the page and actually managed to get the information I desired. And since it's quite frankly easier to block all ads instead of configuring the ad block to only block on certain pages, I by default block all ads.
This pretty much sums it up, nice guys finish last. You don't block a site, people have a few bad experiences or get fed up and block all ads. And those battling the ad blocker with new and obnoxious ways to push ads are usually the worst of the lot. Since the serious companies can't stop other sites being dicks on the Internet, what are they do to? If you're using an ad blocker and say they should just go away, you're being a hypocrite. You want the content they provide, but not the ads. That's okay, I'd like go to a store and legally take things for free too but I can understand why the store don't think that's much of a business model. Personally I'm more and more in the corner that I'd pay to avoid ads, but I see plenty people who don't want to pay, don't want ads, they just feel entitled to get it for free.
I wouldn't mind using Win10 professionally. It's not my computer anyway, if my employer wants to be a leaking faucet of information and advertising billboard that's not my problem or job responsibility. And I expect to get paid no matter what automatic upgrades break shit at critical moments, in fact it's probably extra overtime - you do get overtime pay, right? I just won't be using it at home except maybe as a Wintendo.
Nothing new there. It's going to be virtually impossible to push Windows out of this desktop market. It's simple network effects. Linux would have to offer something that isn't available on Windows that people care strongly about for people to switch. Unlikely that is going to happen. The only thing that linux has that Windows doesn't is that it is available for free. But until the applications they use are also available on linux AND it is installed from day 1 they aren't going to switch en-mass.
If Google didn't have Chromebooks I think they'd have crawled into Microsoft's "convertible" space with Android by now but to Google's business model a cloud-oriented laptop is much better than Linux. The smartphone/tablet market has been dealing Windows the death of a thousand pin pricks, sure there are a few professional applications with no real match but more and more the "light" mobile versions are good enough. What's really missing is someone to do the platform push, people aren't going to look for ISOs to reinstall their OS. To get things in real motion someone must get behind it and put it on the shop floor for people to buy.
There are two ways to be rehabilitated: 1) The hard way, being honest about your past but that you've changed and atoned and that you're sorry but that you can't go back to undo it. You have no right to demand that people forgive you or act like it didn't happen and some never will but it's your life choices and you're stuck with the consequences. 2) The easy way, escaping it by obscurity and deception. If nobody knows your past, there's nothing to forgive and forget. You never have to face your past, you never have to really work with yourself, you never have to deal with the scorn in someone else's eyes.
I think the number of people who haven't really dealt with their past vastly exceeds the people who have and can't get a second chance. Let's say a person is convicted for embezzlement. He knows the manager wouldn't let him handle the cash register if he knew. But wait, now he can ask Google to forget that. What are the odds you're giving a reformed criminal a break or did you just let a notorious fraudster steal your money? The "right to be forgotten" is a right to whitewash your past, which is anything but being rehabilitated. It's the best way to avoid dealing with your past which is another thing entirely.
The very same reason people could run and hide so easily in the past was also the reason many were so vary of outsiders. You never knew if this was a criminal or drifter who'd just grab what he could and be on his way before trouble caught up to him. And that's on top of the free speech reasons, you can't have the right to be forgotten without taking away other people's right to remember. That it's blocked from being found instead of taken down at the source is proof this is a dirty underhanded blow, like in the Matrix when Smith says "what good is a phone call... if you're unable to speak?"
If you are a gamer that wants to know you'll be able to pick up the Big New Thing on Linux... we aren't there yet. That day may come soon-ish, but we aren't.
I was pleasantly surprised to see XCOM 2 had native Linux support, that counts as one of the "Big New Things" for me. But yeah that is more the exception than the norm, hopefully Vulkan can change that.
Trucks do the same thing at times, assuming that the other vehicle will give way. If a truck wants to merge into your lane then common sense says to move regardless of who has the right to be there. So how do you teach that to an AI?
You think this is the first case where Google had to adjust the programming to cope with how people actually drive? Reality is that there's a ton of unwritten rules that don't formally violate any law or regulation but is all about managing expectations, like how we resolve yield deadlocks, lane changing/merging and positioning, passing various obstacles and so on. And yes, large vehicles like buses and trucks seem to follow their own rules sometimes, but Google's car doesn't care what's right or if it got snubbed somehow. If practice suggests it has to yield to the bus, it'll just do that no matter if there's any formal rule that says it should. In fact, didn't they among other things teach the car to break the speed limit by up to 10% to stay with the flow of traffic? I'd love to know what their legal department felt about that, even though it's undoubtedly the right thing to do.
More like an ATM that should self-destruct if it can't guarantee the integrity of its cash store, which seems a lot more doable. Autonomous weapons aren't humans, they're expendable like bomb robots and indeed bombs themselves. Being expendable they also don't need to consider the operator, a drone can easily default to self-terminate where a plane can not. And unless you've got some extremely fancy equipment, of course they'll only take cryptographically signed orders from the chain of command. Unlike today's military equipment which often defaults to whoever posesses it can use it, which is why the IS has been able to take a lot of the US arms left in Iraq.
If anything, the autonomous weapons system will be loyal to a fault. They'll never desert, never surrender, they'll never refuse to take part in war crimes and atrocities, they'll never disclose anything they're not programmed to, they will wipe from their memory what they're asked to wipe and so on. Sure in theory they could store much more for review and you wouldn't have soldiers acting rashly or mad with power and taking it out on the civilians, but in practice I bet there'll be black ops where you just don't want a paper trail and no witnesses. Or the system is corrupt to the top and I don't mean you have to be fucking Hitler. Just rationalizing to yourself that what the military does is for the good of the country, so close your eyes. It certainly works for waterboarding and such.
Sure, I use Linux because it is a better desktop OS than Windows, but I wouldn't call its less than 2% market share a "horse race" with Windows.
In other words, Linux is just as irrelevant on the desktop as Windows is on mobile? Them's fighting words - well nerd rage words - here, I'll get the popcorn.
Pretending that back doors don't exist is what will create an Orwellian society. The back door is already there. Thats the problem. The problem isn't that the government wants Apple to use it, and certainly not that the government wants Apple to create one (remember the original narrative?)
With enough C4 you can get into anything physical I own, that's not a backdoor it's just the degree of physical protection it has. Apple has taken the user's very weak lock (the PIN) and tried to put in a much more secure box but without dedicated hardware they had to do it in firmware. It's not a perfect solution but not many have the power to compel Apple to produce a signed firmware disabling it, don't let perfect be the enemy of good.
At worst, you're back to the user's shitty lock. At no point does Apple circumvent the user's security measures, they're just so pathetically weak it'll be brute forced immediately without Apple's protection. And they've improved it in their next generation hardware, closing even this loophole. Come on, it's the digital equivalent of a bicycle lock and you blame Apple? If you want real security, use full disk encryption with a strong password don't rely on a damn PIN.
Consider that there is also a content/service industry lobby of Netflix, YouTube, iTunes, Spotify, Steam, Skype etc. that don't want ISPs to get creative. I doubt it's enough of a voter issue to matter, so her position probably means she's received campaign contributions from the "right" lobbying group. Which means she might actually remember after the election too, unlike much the other fluff they say to get elected. While I think there's a few cases where there's actual ideology involved like Ted Cruz and religion, for the most part just follow the money...
You say it like it's a good thing. The premise of DirectX 12/Vulkan is that game/engine developers want more low level access. If that premise is false they're both going to flop. And I'd say OpenGL has bet a lot more on Vulkan than Microsoft has on DX12, if the premise is false it's worst for Linux and open source in particular. Winning the battle is not so great if you're losing the war.
The state keeps me from driving the car I bought. Just because I drive 127 MPH in a school zone *ONE TIME*, now I'm no longer allowed to drive my own car.
To put it this way, I would dread the day the US said you wusses take care of yourself we're pulling out of NATO. Despite being occupied once in living memory, we're still so naive we'd be cheering on Chamberlain and "peace for our time" right up to the point Russian Spetsnaz or IS militants start parading in the capital, like they did the very same day the Nazis invaded. Fortunately Eastern Europe has been peeling away from Russia, so hopefully we're not put to the test because I think we'd epic fail again.
That said our military equipment is largely yours, today we fly American F-16s tomorrow we fly American F-35s. We do NATO exercises together, learning tactics from you. Our plans for defense are part of NATOs plan for defense, like forward storage of US military equipment for US troops to defend the alliance. And despite arms trade being a contentious topic we don't advertise much, we actually have some high tech missile systems and such we sell to the US and other allies. Granted the US keeps quite a few cards to themselves, but there's quite a lot worth stealing.
But when it comes to attitude, it's almost like we don't believe in evil anymore. That we're all good at heart and all the bad guys have just had bad childhoods or bad experiences or have been indoctrinated or brain washed. That hate should be met with love, that people are just misunderstood and have lost their way and that everyone can be rehabilitated back to upstanding members of society. And despite all the evidence to the contrary it's not their failure, it's our failure to get them off this destructive path. And if we could just find that, we'd all hold hands and sing kumbayah.
And the Internet (ARPANET) was created because... who gives a shit, really? You talk like TOR is some kind of service like Facebook, shut it down and it's down. It's not, it's a piece of software. You can run TOR even if you ban all US nodes from touching your circuit, as long as there's someone out there willing to be your relay. That's kinda the whole point, to distribute the traffic through multiple nodes that aren't likely to collude to decrypt your traffic. So I can talk to TOR entry guard at a university in Germany that talks to a relay node in China that talks to an exit node in the US. Each link in the chain protects me against some abuse, including US abuse. Don't think the world will forgot the NSA's transgressions any time soon. Make a US panopticon if you want, but nobody will trust it.
There's a huge difference between the places on earth we've turned into productive habitats and those we just sustain as research outposts through massive external support. Even in Norway that's a cold and hostile country we have cave dwellers from 9000 years ago right after the ice cap melted from the last ice age, so the description of most of earth as particularly hostile is exaggerated. It has air, it has water, it has radiation shielding, as long as you have wildlife to provide food and furs you're making a living. But we haven't and won't colonize Sahara, the Antarctic or the oceans because it's so hard to live there the net productivity is negative.
We literally only have a few hundred people on the South Pole and only a few thousand on the whole continent. Pretty much all the materials, equipment and supplies are flown in, because there's nothing but snow, ice and then some more snow. Unless you're in the realm of alchemy and can turn water into something else like wood or iron it's just not within our realm of scientific and technological progress to make it so either. A Mars base is a massive money pit. And turning it into a Mars colony well it's going to become a much, much bigger money pit before the trend turns and you need earth less.
A public utility is quite good when what you want is service delivery, like power, water, sewage, renovation are quite well-defined services that don't really change much. We had a public telecom company here in Norway, it worked okay for delivering phone calls. But when customers wanted new technology like ISDN and ADSL the rollout was slow, the prices high and being a monopoly they had very little incentive to become more progressive or effective. Here in Norway the fiber rollout is a three-way race between telecom, cable and power companies and they've been quite aggressive since the first to cover a market usually don't leave enough for a runner up. Right now the market share of fiber is 28% and rising quick.
It is a challenge that the competition post-fiber is almost non-existant and open to gouging, but right now I wouldn't mess with this business model. There has been talk about forced opening of content services, like we had on phone lines. Basically that the company must lease the fiber line to others so they can deliver TV, Internet etc. but we're not there yet. I think the trend of Netflix etc. in practice will get there ahead of any regulation anyway. And I suspect we'll see more subsidies for rural areas, already we have quite a few public incentives to speed up the roll-out. Maybe once we hit 70-80% coverage we'd go back to having a public utility, but today? I think it'd just grind everything to a halt.
This creates huge problems for people who think France is big. Who in Europe would take a train from Madrid to Tel Aviv ? Yet these same people would be happy to tell us that we should build a rail line from LA to Atlanta. Or Seattle to New York. Or San Francisco to DC.
Well you typically don't build a long HSR line because you expect everyone to ride it end to end. I agree that that coast to coast I'd rather fly. But the east coast from Miami to Portland could easily have HSR, not beacuse you'd go all the way but some go Portland-Boston, Boston-New York, New York-Washington, Washington-Raleigh, Raleigh-Atlanta, Atlanta-Jacksonville, Jacksonville-Daytona Beach, Daytona Beach-Miami. Usually you can estimate around 3 hours @ 150 MPH as the break-even, including acceleration/breaking and maybe a stop or two 350-400 miles is a realistic range where HSR is as quick or quicker than plane and a lot more comfortable. And with night trains you could do trips like New York-Atlanta overnight, it's often just as comfortable as rushing with a plane and crashing at a hotel to get up in the morning. The killer is the investment cost and getting the right of way, once it's operational it's pretty neat and lasting infrastructure.
Also, while I'm at it, to the extent that some invited, while others tolerated, aside from introducing different licenses with the problem that that creates, leads to the issue of "estoppel"--a situation in which one cannot assert a position, even if legally entitled to do so, do to his prior actions and/or the reliance of another upon those actions.
I find it highly unlikely that estoppel would stick to anyone but those that have done it to themselves. If I write some GPLv2 code without contributing it to the kernel, somebody else says hey GPLv2 that's compatible and add it to the kernel they got no authority to alter the license to "quasi-GPL" and whoever is relying on the "quasi-GPL" can't use their actions as estoppel to halt my lawsuit since it's not my actions. And since it's open source and free for distribution to anyone, there's no technical action or inaction to indicate permission. The only question is if legal inaction could lead to some form of estoppel, but even then it'd probably be a limitation on damages. If it's in violation of copyright, they still have to cease violating it. Unless you have some kind of promissory estoppel, but I don't think anyone has made that kind of promises on behalf of the whole project.
Slashdot Mirror
Lately they're going for all these crazy niches and "next big things" that usually works out to either being a flop or if it's big, then nVidia can just stroll in from behind with a product once the market is mature. Like an ITX size 175W graphics card and so on. Even when they "win" like with Mantle nobody really cares until it becomes a standard like DirectX12 or Vulkan. Like this, I'm sure AMD will use a ton of money on the standardization effort, then nVidia will come and say "that's neat, here's Maxwell/Pascal in a box" and walk away with 80%+ of the market AMD built up.
And for all those hoping for VR to save the day, it rode the 3D TV hype wave. Now consumers have mostly rejected it and 4K is all the rage, people don't like wearing glasses and helmets even less. And Google Glass totally failed to make the cyborg look seem cool. I think the people behind it sold out to Facebook at just the right time and really... it's a $599 accessory for people with a $1000+ computer, that should be a hint. AMD won't recover until they get back to making good CPUs/GPUs and stop flailing around from one hare-brained scheme to the next.
I'm guessing it'll be like the SOX act in US law where the CFO gets to sign a statement these fiscal numbers are accurate or I could go to jail for 20 years. How is he to know that? Not the lawmaker's problem. It's the company itself that must find good enough compliance mechanisms.
Information that is "Top Secret" is born classified. Removing markings, headers, footers etc. doesn't change the classified nature of it. If you measure what was done with her server (leaving it in her hands to sift through at her leisure, turning over only that which she felt like doing and then wiping the rest) with what happens to ANYONE else when they are even suspected of breaking clearance rules ...
Only in the land of fairies and unicorns. Information is born and everyone with a classification is supposed to submit it to a original certification authority that'll determine what, if any, classification status it'll get. Primarily it's the one who creates this information but secondarily everyone who receives it also has an independent duty to get any information they think is classified reviewed. From what I gather a lot of people sent information to Clinton's server that has been retroactively classified, meaning those who sent it didn't do their job. The accusations are so far as I can tell that Clinton should have recognized some of this information as obviously classified, so she didn't do her job either.
I'd be much more interested to hear if there's any accusations of mishandling actual, pre-classified information. It's one thing to say that you could have, should have, maybe seen this was classified it's quite another to be reckless about content that's clearly marked secret/top secret. If they can prove that, they might have an actual case against her. If it's only a case of omission as a recipient of information that ought to be classified, that doesn't seem like that big a deal.
Something tells me I'd either be very happy with my starting salary, or very unhappy with my "master" salary...
Base libraries like these are often widely used but everybody assumes somebody else has done the code reviews and exploit testing. It took some major exploits like heartbleed to make people realize that OpenSSL was understaffed, full of cruft and really far from the ideal crypto library. Yes, in this case it was a downgrade exploit to an export cipher. That doesn't mean the US government is generally at fault for downgrade attacks, it's poor coding. That a library might have support for old yet known flawed protocols/algorithms for compatibility is a reasonable feature, but the handshake is supposed to verify the client and server connected in the best possible way. But it's so much easier to blame somebody else.
There are plenty of good arguments to be made for moving the math curiculum to statistics, combinatorics and other areas, but "making more people pass the exam" isn't one of them.
I think there's a big difference between general education and specialized education. I mean if you gave that high school test to fifth graders and they mostly flunked you wouldn't say they're too dumb and should be held back you'd say the test was too hard. In a general education you put what the general population of average intelligence and with average effort can understand and adjust your expectations accordingly, flunking should really just be for those that don't really try, have given up, are borderline mentally challenged or otherwise are showing little to no results from being in class.
Specialized education is a different story, you must understand this much math to become a structural engineer. You must understand this much medicine before we let you become a doctor. You must understand this much law before we let you become a lawyer. And if you have to lower the expectations, well you have more of a gap to cover. Or that it's some form of elective that those who want to go into that branch should take or else they end up with extra classes just to get to the starting line. There's good reasons to have "weed-out" classes in specialized education, but unless you want people to just give up and start flipping burgers at McD I don't see any reason to set arbitrarily high standards to create dropouts in general education.
That and an 8-way Xeon system with a couple TB of RAM, I presume? To play a console port...
Just as I resumed reading, the damn ad once again scrolled me away from where I was and started playing the video again. After a few cycles of this bullshit, I decided to install an ad blocker and then went back to the page and actually managed to get the information I desired. And since it's quite frankly easier to block all ads instead of configuring the ad block to only block on certain pages, I by default block all ads.
This pretty much sums it up, nice guys finish last. You don't block a site, people have a few bad experiences or get fed up and block all ads. And those battling the ad blocker with new and obnoxious ways to push ads are usually the worst of the lot. Since the serious companies can't stop other sites being dicks on the Internet, what are they do to? If you're using an ad blocker and say they should just go away, you're being a hypocrite. You want the content they provide, but not the ads. That's okay, I'd like go to a store and legally take things for free too but I can understand why the store don't think that's much of a business model. Personally I'm more and more in the corner that I'd pay to avoid ads, but I see plenty people who don't want to pay, don't want ads, they just feel entitled to get it for free.
I wouldn't mind using Win10 professionally. It's not my computer anyway, if my employer wants to be a leaking faucet of information and advertising billboard that's not my problem or job responsibility. And I expect to get paid no matter what automatic upgrades break shit at critical moments, in fact it's probably extra overtime - you do get overtime pay, right? I just won't be using it at home except maybe as a Wintendo.
Nothing new there. It's going to be virtually impossible to push Windows out of this desktop market. It's simple network effects. Linux would have to offer something that isn't available on Windows that people care strongly about for people to switch. Unlikely that is going to happen. The only thing that linux has that Windows doesn't is that it is available for free. But until the applications they use are also available on linux AND it is installed from day 1 they aren't going to switch en-mass.
If Google didn't have Chromebooks I think they'd have crawled into Microsoft's "convertible" space with Android by now but to Google's business model a cloud-oriented laptop is much better than Linux. The smartphone/tablet market has been dealing Windows the death of a thousand pin pricks, sure there are a few professional applications with no real match but more and more the "light" mobile versions are good enough. What's really missing is someone to do the platform push, people aren't going to look for ISOs to reinstall their OS. To get things in real motion someone must get behind it and put it on the shop floor for people to buy.
There are two ways to be rehabilitated:
1) The hard way, being honest about your past but that you've changed and atoned and that you're sorry but that you can't go back to undo it. You have no right to demand that people forgive you or act like it didn't happen and some never will but it's your life choices and you're stuck with the consequences.
2) The easy way, escaping it by obscurity and deception. If nobody knows your past, there's nothing to forgive and forget. You never have to face your past, you never have to really work with yourself, you never have to deal with the scorn in someone else's eyes.
I think the number of people who haven't really dealt with their past vastly exceeds the people who have and can't get a second chance. Let's say a person is convicted for embezzlement. He knows the manager wouldn't let him handle the cash register if he knew. But wait, now he can ask Google to forget that. What are the odds you're giving a reformed criminal a break or did you just let a notorious fraudster steal your money? The "right to be forgotten" is a right to whitewash your past, which is anything but being rehabilitated. It's the best way to avoid dealing with your past which is another thing entirely.
The very same reason people could run and hide so easily in the past was also the reason many were so vary of outsiders. You never knew if this was a criminal or drifter who'd just grab what he could and be on his way before trouble caught up to him. And that's on top of the free speech reasons, you can't have the right to be forgotten without taking away other people's right to remember. That it's blocked from being found instead of taken down at the source is proof this is a dirty underhanded blow, like in the Matrix when Smith says "what good is a phone call... if you're unable to speak?"
If you are a gamer that wants to know you'll be able to pick up the Big New Thing on Linux... we aren't there yet. That day may come soon-ish, but we aren't.
I was pleasantly surprised to see XCOM 2 had native Linux support, that counts as one of the "Big New Things" for me. But yeah that is more the exception than the norm, hopefully Vulkan can change that.
Trucks do the same thing at times, assuming that the other vehicle will give way. If a truck wants to merge into your lane then common sense says to move regardless of who has the right to be there. So how do you teach that to an AI?
You think this is the first case where Google had to adjust the programming to cope with how people actually drive? Reality is that there's a ton of unwritten rules that don't formally violate any law or regulation but is all about managing expectations, like how we resolve yield deadlocks, lane changing/merging and positioning, passing various obstacles and so on. And yes, large vehicles like buses and trucks seem to follow their own rules sometimes, but Google's car doesn't care what's right or if it got snubbed somehow. If practice suggests it has to yield to the bus, it'll just do that no matter if there's any formal rule that says it should. In fact, didn't they among other things teach the car to break the speed limit by up to 10% to stay with the flow of traffic? I'd love to know what their legal department felt about that, even though it's undoubtedly the right thing to do.
More like an ATM that should self-destruct if it can't guarantee the integrity of its cash store, which seems a lot more doable. Autonomous weapons aren't humans, they're expendable like bomb robots and indeed bombs themselves. Being expendable they also don't need to consider the operator, a drone can easily default to self-terminate where a plane can not. And unless you've got some extremely fancy equipment, of course they'll only take cryptographically signed orders from the chain of command. Unlike today's military equipment which often defaults to whoever posesses it can use it, which is why the IS has been able to take a lot of the US arms left in Iraq.
If anything, the autonomous weapons system will be loyal to a fault. They'll never desert, never surrender, they'll never refuse to take part in war crimes and atrocities, they'll never disclose anything they're not programmed to, they will wipe from their memory what they're asked to wipe and so on. Sure in theory they could store much more for review and you wouldn't have soldiers acting rashly or mad with power and taking it out on the civilians, but in practice I bet there'll be black ops where you just don't want a paper trail and no witnesses. Or the system is corrupt to the top and I don't mean you have to be fucking Hitler. Just rationalizing to yourself that what the military does is for the good of the country, so close your eyes. It certainly works for waterboarding and such.
Sure, I use Linux because it is a better desktop OS than Windows, but I wouldn't call its less than 2% market share a "horse race" with Windows.
In other words, Linux is just as irrelevant on the desktop as Windows is on mobile? Them's fighting words - well nerd rage words - here, I'll get the popcorn.
Pretending that back doors don't exist is what will create an Orwellian society. The back door is already there. Thats the problem. The problem isn't that the government wants Apple to use it, and certainly not that the government wants Apple to create one (remember the original narrative?)
With enough C4 you can get into anything physical I own, that's not a backdoor it's just the degree of physical protection it has. Apple has taken the user's very weak lock (the PIN) and tried to put in a much more secure box but without dedicated hardware they had to do it in firmware. It's not a perfect solution but not many have the power to compel Apple to produce a signed firmware disabling it, don't let perfect be the enemy of good.
At worst, you're back to the user's shitty lock. At no point does Apple circumvent the user's security measures, they're just so pathetically weak it'll be brute forced immediately without Apple's protection. And they've improved it in their next generation hardware, closing even this loophole. Come on, it's the digital equivalent of a bicycle lock and you blame Apple? If you want real security, use full disk encryption with a strong password don't rely on a damn PIN.
Consider that there is also a content/service industry lobby of Netflix, YouTube, iTunes, Spotify, Steam, Skype etc. that don't want ISPs to get creative. I doubt it's enough of a voter issue to matter, so her position probably means she's received campaign contributions from the "right" lobbying group. Which means she might actually remember after the election too, unlike much the other fluff they say to get elected. While I think there's a few cases where there's actual ideology involved like Ted Cruz and religion, for the most part just follow the money...
You say it like it's a good thing. The premise of DirectX 12/Vulkan is that game/engine developers want more low level access. If that premise is false they're both going to flop. And I'd say OpenGL has bet a lot more on Vulkan than Microsoft has on DX12, if the premise is false it's worst for Linux and open source in particular. Winning the battle is not so great if you're losing the war.
The state keeps me from driving the car I bought. Just because I drive 127 MPH in a school zone *ONE TIME*, now I'm no longer allowed to drive my own car.
So.... your DeLorean is defective?
To put it this way, I would dread the day the US said you wusses take care of yourself we're pulling out of NATO. Despite being occupied once in living memory, we're still so naive we'd be cheering on Chamberlain and "peace for our time" right up to the point Russian Spetsnaz or IS militants start parading in the capital, like they did the very same day the Nazis invaded. Fortunately Eastern Europe has been peeling away from Russia, so hopefully we're not put to the test because I think we'd epic fail again.
That said our military equipment is largely yours, today we fly American F-16s tomorrow we fly American F-35s. We do NATO exercises together, learning tactics from you. Our plans for defense are part of NATOs plan for defense, like forward storage of US military equipment for US troops to defend the alliance. And despite arms trade being a contentious topic we don't advertise much, we actually have some high tech missile systems and such we sell to the US and other allies. Granted the US keeps quite a few cards to themselves, but there's quite a lot worth stealing.
But when it comes to attitude, it's almost like we don't believe in evil anymore. That we're all good at heart and all the bad guys have just had bad childhoods or bad experiences or have been indoctrinated or brain washed. That hate should be met with love, that people are just misunderstood and have lost their way and that everyone can be rehabilitated back to upstanding members of society. And despite all the evidence to the contrary it's not their failure, it's our failure to get them off this destructive path. And if we could just find that, we'd all hold hands and sing kumbayah.
And the Internet (ARPANET) was created because... who gives a shit, really? You talk like TOR is some kind of service like Facebook, shut it down and it's down. It's not, it's a piece of software. You can run TOR even if you ban all US nodes from touching your circuit, as long as there's someone out there willing to be your relay. That's kinda the whole point, to distribute the traffic through multiple nodes that aren't likely to collude to decrypt your traffic. So I can talk to TOR entry guard at a university in Germany that talks to a relay node in China that talks to an exit node in the US. Each link in the chain protects me against some abuse, including US abuse. Don't think the world will forgot the NSA's transgressions any time soon. Make a US panopticon if you want, but nobody will trust it.
There's a huge difference between the places on earth we've turned into productive habitats and those we just sustain as research outposts through massive external support. Even in Norway that's a cold and hostile country we have cave dwellers from 9000 years ago right after the ice cap melted from the last ice age, so the description of most of earth as particularly hostile is exaggerated. It has air, it has water, it has radiation shielding, as long as you have wildlife to provide food and furs you're making a living. But we haven't and won't colonize Sahara, the Antarctic or the oceans because it's so hard to live there the net productivity is negative.
We literally only have a few hundred people on the South Pole and only a few thousand on the whole continent. Pretty much all the materials, equipment and supplies are flown in, because there's nothing but snow, ice and then some more snow. Unless you're in the realm of alchemy and can turn water into something else like wood or iron it's just not within our realm of scientific and technological progress to make it so either. A Mars base is a massive money pit. And turning it into a Mars colony well it's going to become a much, much bigger money pit before the trend turns and you need earth less.
A public utility is quite good when what you want is service delivery, like power, water, sewage, renovation are quite well-defined services that don't really change much. We had a public telecom company here in Norway, it worked okay for delivering phone calls. But when customers wanted new technology like ISDN and ADSL the rollout was slow, the prices high and being a monopoly they had very little incentive to become more progressive or effective. Here in Norway the fiber rollout is a three-way race between telecom, cable and power companies and they've been quite aggressive since the first to cover a market usually don't leave enough for a runner up. Right now the market share of fiber is 28% and rising quick.
It is a challenge that the competition post-fiber is almost non-existant and open to gouging, but right now I wouldn't mess with this business model. There has been talk about forced opening of content services, like we had on phone lines. Basically that the company must lease the fiber line to others so they can deliver TV, Internet etc. but we're not there yet. I think the trend of Netflix etc. in practice will get there ahead of any regulation anyway. And I suspect we'll see more subsidies for rural areas, already we have quite a few public incentives to speed up the roll-out. Maybe once we hit 70-80% coverage we'd go back to having a public utility, but today? I think it'd just grind everything to a halt.
This creates huge problems for people who think France is big. Who in Europe would take a train from Madrid to Tel Aviv ? Yet these same people would be happy to tell us that we should build a rail line from LA to Atlanta. Or Seattle to New York. Or San Francisco to DC.
Well you typically don't build a long HSR line because you expect everyone to ride it end to end. I agree that that coast to coast I'd rather fly. But the east coast from Miami to Portland could easily have HSR, not beacuse you'd go all the way but some go Portland-Boston, Boston-New York, New York-Washington, Washington-Raleigh, Raleigh-Atlanta, Atlanta-Jacksonville, Jacksonville-Daytona Beach, Daytona Beach-Miami. Usually you can estimate around 3 hours @ 150 MPH as the break-even, including acceleration/breaking and maybe a stop or two 350-400 miles is a realistic range where HSR is as quick or quicker than plane and a lot more comfortable. And with night trains you could do trips like New York-Atlanta overnight, it's often just as comfortable as rushing with a plane and crashing at a hotel to get up in the morning. The killer is the investment cost and getting the right of way, once it's operational it's pretty neat and lasting infrastructure.
Also, while I'm at it, to the extent that some invited, while others tolerated, aside from introducing different licenses with the problem that that creates, leads to the issue of "estoppel"--a situation in which one cannot assert a position, even if legally entitled to do so, do to his prior actions and/or the reliance of another upon those actions.
I find it highly unlikely that estoppel would stick to anyone but those that have done it to themselves. If I write some GPLv2 code without contributing it to the kernel, somebody else says hey GPLv2 that's compatible and add it to the kernel they got no authority to alter the license to "quasi-GPL" and whoever is relying on the "quasi-GPL" can't use their actions as estoppel to halt my lawsuit since it's not my actions. And since it's open source and free for distribution to anyone, there's no technical action or inaction to indicate permission. The only question is if legal inaction could lead to some form of estoppel, but even then it'd probably be a limitation on damages. If it's in violation of copyright, they still have to cease violating it. Unless you have some kind of promissory estoppel, but I don't think anyone has made that kind of promises on behalf of the whole project.