On the other hand, how much information do you really need to pass? I'm thinking a magic header and an ID over a ten second ad spot, say 256 bit max. At 16384 Hz that's 64 times/s*10s = 640 times. All you need is a little residual bias and you're good. That said I don't know why you'd limit yourself to only using the high band, you could implement something like Cinavia for ads which seems like a much more advanced version of the same thing. I think that covers 1-4. As for 5. you probably need some kind of tie-in app that would for example collect votes for a live show, offer prizes or in some other way encourage the user to have their phone or tablet out. Offer some BS like voice control to make microphone access a plausible request. If you can then make a HTTP request you can start pairing on IP, ISP supercookies, OS ad identifiers or whatever. It won't be perfect but more than good enough for advertising.
Until Paris conforms to Sharia? You must be dreaming dear...
The Moslem population is anywhere from 5% to 8% to the total French population. Not gonna happen anytime soon.
How many percent in Mosul support Daesh? How many of the Germans were truly Nazis and had a bone to pick with the Jews? The problem with militant fundamentalists is that they're willing to chop the head off anyone who sticks their neck out. And they're willing to sacrifice others to achieve their ultimate goals. If militant Islamists can cause enough terror to provoke counter-attacks by anti-immigration extremists you have 5-8% of the population caught between a rock and a hard place. When enough bad blood is spilled it doesn't matter, after WWII people hated all Germans even the ones who never took any part in the war and never wanted to. Strength in numbers is nice in a democracy, but when you're talking more or less an occupation cruelty, willingness to die and organized effort against individuals that want to be left alone means a small minority can set the agenda.
That asshole in Norway was trying to trigger a war against Muslims in Western Europe.
No, he attacked the main government building and the youth organization of our largest party that he felt was selling out the country to Muslim immigrants. While there were also some immigrants killed, most were ethnic Norwegians he deemed to be traitors. If the primary target had been Muslims, there would have been many other targets with far less collateral damage like a mosque. He wanted to incite "true Norwegians" to a revolt to end multiculturalism and return us to a white, christian, patriarchal mono-culture to prevent a future religious and cultural war. Not start one.
It'd be a little more convincing if nVidia wasn't the only game in town Valve has. They don't care if they sell you a graphics card for a Windows or SteamOS box. AMD is too economically crippled to make a strategic investment and Intel still isn't what I'd put in a game console. In short, Steam boxes could flop and it'd be a much bigger deal for Valve than nVidia. So I guess we'll see, it might light a fire under their feet but I wouldn't bet on it.
Somehow my yoda-to-English translator kicked in and I read "car is driving" as "is driving the car", I got the terrified part but couldn't quite see the relevance...
Not always, it's a bit like "the customer is always right" and if you've worked in IT you'll know that sometimes the customer is horribly, horribly wrong and even if you did try to please them it would end up an unusable mess they wouldn't be happy with and they'd still blame you. That said, I'd generally try to have replacement functionality up and running before I pull the plug on the old solution, I know how saying you'll get those features back later works when other things keep taking priority.
The biggest issue with parallelism is that a lot of stuff can't be parallelized in a way that makes sense. The way it is done (dispatching and gathering nodes) only makes sense if the query takes a really long time, otherwise there is a lot of overhead that destroys any type of speedup and could actually make everything else slower. Typically multi-threading in databases is done to speed up multiple independent queries, not a single query.
Define "really long time", in the example he's running a query that takes less than a second and gets it down to <250ms. Sure, it's not useful for transaction processing but I got many queries running on millions of rows where anything from a minute to an hour is more like it and milliseconds are peanuts. I would think most people have at least some reports that would benefit.
One rather enormous limitation of the current feature is that we only generate Gather nodes immediately on top of Parallel Seq Scan nodes. This means that this feature doesn't currently work for inheritance hierarchies (which are used to implement partitioned tables) because there would be an Append node in between. Nor is it possible to push a join down into the workers at present. (...) With things as they are, about the only case that benefits from this feature is a sequential scan of a table that cannot be index-accelerated but can be made faster by having multiple workers test the filter condition in parallel.
No partitioning, no joins, right now the only thing you can speed up is a simple table scan where you can't/won't use an index. This is more "proof of concept" parallelism than a useful feature right now. I guess in a release or two this will be a big thing.
If I recall correctly, you have the file in memory before you save it to disk. Check if the first bytes are 0x8950E4E70D0A1A0A and it should be "close enough".I'm not sure if anyone has compiled a list of headers and file extensions, but it seems a little overkill.
When this happens, and it will, the number one social concern will be to figure out how hard work can still be incented. Without hard work, humans become listless and unhappy. As gleeful as you are to disparage Puritans, they understood this aspect of human nature well. To use an example you're likely comfortable with, imagine those trust fund babies whose life lacking struggle results in them being intolerable douchebags.
They're douchebags because they're privileged enough to do what nobody else can and they know it. If being a deadbeat slacker was something everyone could do it wouldn't have the same effect. And I think you vastly underestimate how much people can find personal goals that don't contribute anything meaningful to society, I can totally waste a whole weekend doing nothing "productive" yet not be "listless and unhappy". Probably years too. I could easily get hooked on a MMORPG and spend 8 hours/day becoming the überlord of something. I'm just not in the addict phase where I'd quit my day job, but if I didn't need my day job....
Disclosing or dismissing? "Sure it has a few bugs, but I'm sure they'll get fixed soon and it's a great game 9/10", please put me on the exclusive interview/preview/kickback list and not the shit list for your next game. Game reviews don't have the greatest reputation for integrity, to say the least. Oddly enough launch sales are crazy high despite except for first to level in MMORPGs there's rarely any hurry. So if you give it a kick in the teeth because it's buggy and not very playable right now the publishers tend to not like you. And content is king, if you don't have anything special except the post-release reviews everyone can do you're likely to go out of business.
I guess we've met this guy. Apart from that, personally I'd like to ban the lone "=" operator so it's "==" for comparison, ":=" for assignment with all the other two char operators like != and += intact. So many languages try to be "smart" instead of just making the difference more explicit.
If ET were there, transmitting on RF with the same power we use for radio/TV signals - our detectors aren't even good enough to hear it over noise.
From what I understand it's primarily going to pick up military radar or intentional "pings", signal broadcast is very weak compared to radars trying to detect stealth aircraft that is diverting 99%+ of the signal away from the source. There's not really any reason to send radio/TV signals with that power and for information efficiency we're going to encode them so they're almost indistinguishable from noise anyway. The latter is obviously the best since they're the only ones likely to have any information content we could positively identify. So at least for our current level of technology they have to want to be found.
It works because people will pay for convenience and knowing exactly what your Internet bill will be can be worth more than any savings you might get if you stay under some sort of quota. Particularly when quotes are implemented with nasty overage fees instead of slowing you down to a crawl making you actively extend your quota and accept the charges. For example I subscribe to Spotify and if I forget it's running and it's streaming all night and all day while I'm at work with speakers muted it doesn't cost me a thing, if it was a PPV service and I'd get billed per song... no. Unless I'm subsidizing some really absurd excesses I'm happier with a flat rate, even if it gives a few heavy users a free ride.
While I agree with the basic sentiment, I have to ask one thing.
Of those hundreds of games society stands to lose forever, how many of those are actually worth remembering? How many of those would society care about if we kept them?
Considering how many people go nuts over a few recovered Doctor Who episodes or the IS blowing up a couple old ruins in Palmyra, I'd say a lot of people care. A friend of mine and I still like to retro game from time to time on a C64, I'll admit I would be rather sad if Bubble Bobble was lost forever. Sure, 90% of everything is shit but I think a lot of people would care if we lost some of the classics they played and enjoyed and we managed to just lose them forever. Guess it depends what you mean, the world wouldn't collapse if we lost Mozart or Elvis either but it'd be a poorer place.
Wondering out loud.... Could we not require cable companies to either turn off the "copy once" flag or have a viable freely available DVR solution that is certified to do the necessary DRM... Like having a closed source addition to the commonly available media solutions?
DRM relies on keeping a secret, being closed source is just a tool to obscure it. A small, closed source drop-in module would quickly get picked apart, the key(s) taken and the DRM broken. The more transparent the code, the more of the DRM must happen in hardware to be effective, like Firefox's DRM extensions. They don't actually contains the keys for anything, they just provide an interface to talk to the "trusted" hardware for keys. There is no DRM that can work in the open.
Right... and if anybody thinks the Middle-East->Balkans->Europe or S-America->Mexico->USA migration is a problem now try to imagine what it will be like when large of South America become deforested and the Middle East becomes an uninhabitable dustbowl. Everytime I hear somebody make that: "It's not our problem, let them kill themselves down there, the best thing we can do is not interfere" like the OP I'm tempted to bring up the mess that is Syria which to a large extent became the mess it is because we listened to people who recommend apathy. Interfering is bad but at least you have some influence on the course of events, not interfering is worse because by not interfering you let the situation spin completely out of control.
In case you haven't noticed, our interference has for the most part involved removing the dictators that had been suppressing the religious extremists since they were a threat to their own power, preventing it from spinning out of control. Somebody had a dream that the Middle East would turn into modern democracies like most of Eastern Europe if only they were removed, leading to everything from the Gulf War II to the Arab Spring. In retrospect, we can now say most of these efforts have been a horrible failure and cruel dictators have been replaced by a reign of terror by sadistic Islamist fundamentalists who will rape, kill, torture and blow up civilians including women and children and military alike in total disregard of human rights, rules of warfare and bask in their notoriety. Not even Hitler broadcast the Holocaust on YouTube. If I could go back in time I'd say bring back Saddam, Gadaffi, Assad, the Egyptian military junta and all the other bastards and don't kick the hornet's nest. None of these bastards were a threat to world peace, none of these bastards had any common cause except holding on to their own power. And they had a pretty good sense of self-preservation, which could be used to pressure them with sanctions and limit the atrocities. We took out the lesser evil so the greater evil could rise to power, if the alternative to a dictatorship is a theocracy apathy is a wise cause of action. In fact, that lesson should have been learned as far back as Afghanistan and Iran.
In a power-constrained scenario, then yes. Leakage is eating up any power efficiency you get from smaller features. Smaller chips are cheaper to produce - meaning we should get getting them cheaper or more of them if competition was good - but it still wouldn't make a processor do in 10W what last year's processor did with 15W. We're not quite at the end of the road yet but the fat lady is warming up, Intel missing their tick-tock with Kaby Lake is just the first sign.
How much does it cost to set up a chip fab? Me memory from a late 90s factoid was it was the Billion$ range, and with the ever-shrinking nanometer processes they keep coming up with it can't have gotten cheaper. When a major player goes bankrupt in a market like that it makes it much harder for anew guy to enter, because all the banker isn't stupid. If a company with decades of experience, existing fabs, etc. goes bankrupt, then the odds against our innovative new start-up have to be pretty bad, and a loan in that range has to be extremely fucking risky.
Except that AMD isn't in the chip manufacturing business anymore, that's TSMC, GloFo and Samsung and they split investment costs across the whole ARM market too. In fact, their 14/16nm process is more competitive with Intel than ever, it's AMD that needs to come up with some kick-ass designs. Of course laying out >1 billion transistors in an optimal way is roughly as hard as it sounds....
I don't understand, they were pretty upfront with what they had and what they want to try to do. Seems to me that is kind of the point of Crowd Funding, when you can't get real investors. Seriously, everyone seems to want guarantees about everything - lighten up people, if you want to have a guaranteed return by Treasury Bonds...
But you have two fundamentally different reasons for lack of "real investors", the market risk and the project risk. For example I backed a Kickstarter to create public domain recordings of classical music, extremely low project risk since such recordings are made all the time but clearly not a good economic investment. The game Elite: Dangerous would be somewhere in the middle, sure it's a new game but within a known genre and without any truly experimental technology. And then there's the ones that promise to do something revolutionary new, where you really should take their claims with a ton of salt. Unfortunately many see a presentation, some photoshopped pictures and a little hand-waving and think this is basically a pre-order when it's not.
A recent debate is that medical care is a "fundamental right". So I find myself in need of medical care, does that obligate the government to provide it? Who is the "government" anyway? Government is people. Do I have the right to another person's labor? Are other people obligated to provide me with their resources? That is what things like food, shelter, internet access, and medical care are, they are the time, labor, and resources of others.
I don't have a "fundamental right" to another person's stuff. Claiming such sounds a lot like, "to everyone according to their needs, from everyone according to their abilities." I'd bet that a lot of people don't even know where that phrase comes from or what it means. That phrase is what brought us Marxism, communism, and socialism.
Negative right = the government will not interfere. Positive right = the government will secure your right. If you're absolutely against positive rights, you're against many fundamental rights like the rule of law. If we can raise taxes for police, lawyers og judges to keep you from being murdered, why can't we raise taxes to keep you from starving, thirsting, freezing to death or dying for trivially cured injuries or disease? What you're rebelling against isn't socialism, it's civilization and democracy. It doesn't have to be pinko commie land, you didn't opt in to US law. You didn't opt in to the US tax code. They're part of society and you want out, a place where the government takes nothing "by force" even though it has public consent is a place with no government at all.
I have a right to free speech, does that mean the government must provide me with time on a radio station? I have the right to travel freely, does that obligate the government to buy me a car?
If there was no public roads, your "right to travel freely" would end at the end of your driveway. From there on out it would be a private conglomerate of road owners subject to their terms and conditions for use. Oh and for bonus points they'd also control any water and sewage pipes, electricity, phone, coax or fiber lines going in or out of your city block. What effectively lets you travel is that there's a whole lot of land that's a little bit yours - public property, provided and maintained by the government. If you want to write a letter to your Congressman the US postal service is compelled to deliver it. The phone service is a common carrier and can't refuse to connect you.
Those aren't rights though, they're services provided on a reasonable and non-discriminatory basis - and in some cases even subsidized - to provide opportunities to exercise those rights. And they're not free, you still have to pay postage and phone bills and get your own car - unless you take public transport that is also not free. Are they interfering in a free market? Absolutely. The postage clearly doesn't accurately reflect the actual geographic costs of sending mail, that is by design. How you manage to twist that into subsidies becoming propaganda tools? The postal service doesn't bill by the content, nor does the phone company and the electricity company doesn't ask what you plugged in. By your logic, we have to shut down the public roads because they encourage driving over flying.
And further in still is the complete failure to understand things like the up-front cost of a GPL project base is "disclosure", and that disclosure of those incremental changes is very cheap. Compare embedding linux kernels in things to the up-front and per-unit costs of Wince or VxWorks. Then really _think_ about how non-money-value your fix to that one serial driver really is compared to the item you wan to sell.
But that's pretending software already does 99,9% of the things you want to do. The reality is that for me, personally it's either Windows @ $109 and MS Office @ $149 or Linux and LibreOffice + $258 in custom development and that's not even a week's worth of minimum wage, much less a software professional at contracting rates. The burden is put on the one who commissions the code, but the benefits go to everyone. Sure there's crowdsourcing but then you're not in control of what happens and the incentive is still to wait and see if you can get somebody else to pay, while buying a finished solution you can test it and see that it works to your needs. It's not the disclosure that's being sold cheap, it's the accumulated value of refined, battle tested code that is given away for free to those who have contributed nothing to its existence.
Don't get me wrong, I get that's in the spirit of open/free software but it that doesn't change the fact that the per-copy charge helps distribute the development costs across more users who usually got some value from of the developments made, even though they wouldn't have carried the cost themselves. With open source, every time you run into a rough edge you usually have to apply the polish yourself, which is why many say "Linux is only free if your time is worthless", they all take some of your time but how much time matters. The good news is that you have the source and can always in theory fix it, but you can still burn a lot of money doing it.
'Free' may not quite mean free. It means you can now advertise this in your resume, for example.
Sure but is it a race to the bottom? I mean the whole point is to offer something for cheap now to cash in later, lots of things are about that like oh every sale in existence. But it doesn't work if people are jumping in all the time thinking they'll be the next big thing, the next time you're making a "real" bid the next guy offers $1 and so it goes on and on. I mean $1 isn't ten minutes at minimum wage, it's way below any kind of living wage even eating Ramen noodles and living in your parent's basement. I have a friend who does music on a semi-professional basis, and yeah you can almost always get a free-ish band doing it for the exposure. And they've had to man up and say if that's what you want that's fine but it won't be our band. They've practiced many, many hours both alone and together and want to see some kind of pay-off but they're constantly in competition with bands that think this is their lottery ticket to stardom and will sell themselves very cheap. Like he commented on a local festival, he'd like to play for the local community but it'd have to be almost for free and the other bands don't get play time anywhere else and it would tarnish their reputation. The price tag is mostly about perception, a big name is worth a big price and then you can't act small.
Hasn't Google been testing out their cars in the real world? And if the wiki article is right they've driven over a million miles and only had 14 minor traffic accidents, none of which were the fault of the autonomous system (at least according to Google). If that is true and if my math is correct that puts their accidents per mile ratio at about 1 / 71,400. Again if my math is correct your average human vehicle experiences accidents at a rate of 1 / 66,700. Suggesting Googles autonomous vehicle is safer.
A much more interesting statistic that Google hasn't released is how often their engineers have either intervened or pre-emptively taken over control in order to avoid a potentially bad situation. Not to oversimplify what Google has done, but if I think of my commute to work and map it out to a computer with relatively simple rules like here's the lanes, there's an intersection and there's the light, there's a crossing that you don't pass until it's clear I would say at least 95/100 times it'd get by on very simple rules of the road. Of course since I make my commute ~200*2 = 400 times a year, I'd crash twenty times a year with that accuracy. So I don't really trust the car to handle all sorts of weird until they've told me that we kept the hands off the wheel and let it handle all sorts of weird, even if that looked like a really bad idea.
As trivial as this might seem, having games for linux might help bring in more of the youth crowd. Their comfort level with linux will increase and out of that user stream you'll develop more hardcore linux users. I doubt Steam thought about it that way but in the long run, it is really a smart thing for the future heath of the linux fan base.
They people running "SteamOS" for the most part won't give a shit about Linux as a desktop and never look under the hood. The primary advantage is that you'll get a lot more developers to write OpenGL games and support the graphics/multimedia parts of the stack that the server community don't care about and Android has only partly touched. Unless Valve wants to pull a little "Chromebook" move, say a switch that swaps between console mode and desktop mode and suddenly you have an alternate desktop for basic use. There's been so many failed incarnations of WebTV and friends though that they probably won't do that until it has a heavy presence as a console.
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On the other hand, how much information do you really need to pass? I'm thinking a magic header and an ID over a ten second ad spot, say 256 bit max. At 16384 Hz that's 64 times/s*10s = 640 times. All you need is a little residual bias and you're good. That said I don't know why you'd limit yourself to only using the high band, you could implement something like Cinavia for ads which seems like a much more advanced version of the same thing. I think that covers 1-4. As for 5. you probably need some kind of tie-in app that would for example collect votes for a live show, offer prizes or in some other way encourage the user to have their phone or tablet out. Offer some BS like voice control to make microphone access a plausible request. If you can then make a HTTP request you can start pairing on IP, ISP supercookies, OS ad identifiers or whatever. It won't be perfect but more than good enough for advertising.
Until Paris conforms to Sharia? You must be dreaming dear...
The Moslem population is anywhere from 5% to 8% to the total French population. Not gonna happen anytime soon.
How many percent in Mosul support Daesh? How many of the Germans were truly Nazis and had a bone to pick with the Jews? The problem with militant fundamentalists is that they're willing to chop the head off anyone who sticks their neck out. And they're willing to sacrifice others to achieve their ultimate goals. If militant Islamists can cause enough terror to provoke counter-attacks by anti-immigration extremists you have 5-8% of the population caught between a rock and a hard place. When enough bad blood is spilled it doesn't matter, after WWII people hated all Germans even the ones who never took any part in the war and never wanted to. Strength in numbers is nice in a democracy, but when you're talking more or less an occupation cruelty, willingness to die and organized effort against individuals that want to be left alone means a small minority can set the agenda.
That asshole in Norway was trying to trigger a war against Muslims in Western Europe.
No, he attacked the main government building and the youth organization of our largest party that he felt was selling out the country to Muslim immigrants. While there were also some immigrants killed, most were ethnic Norwegians he deemed to be traitors. If the primary target had been Muslims, there would have been many other targets with far less collateral damage like a mosque. He wanted to incite "true Norwegians" to a revolt to end multiculturalism and return us to a white, christian, patriarchal mono-culture to prevent a future religious and cultural war. Not start one.
It'd be a little more convincing if nVidia wasn't the only game in town Valve has. They don't care if they sell you a graphics card for a Windows or SteamOS box. AMD is too economically crippled to make a strategic investment and Intel still isn't what I'd put in a game console. In short, Steam boxes could flop and it'd be a much bigger deal for Valve than nVidia. So I guess we'll see, it might light a fire under their feet but I wouldn't bet on it.
Somehow my yoda-to-English translator kicked in and I read "car is driving" as "is driving the car", I got the terrified part but couldn't quite see the relevance...
Not always, it's a bit like "the customer is always right" and if you've worked in IT you'll know that sometimes the customer is horribly, horribly wrong and even if you did try to please them it would end up an unusable mess they wouldn't be happy with and they'd still blame you. That said, I'd generally try to have replacement functionality up and running before I pull the plug on the old solution, I know how saying you'll get those features back later works when other things keep taking priority.
The biggest issue with parallelism is that a lot of stuff can't be parallelized in a way that makes sense. The way it is done (dispatching and gathering nodes) only makes sense if the query takes a really long time, otherwise there is a lot of overhead that destroys any type of speedup and could actually make everything else slower. Typically multi-threading in databases is done to speed up multiple independent queries, not a single query.
Define "really long time", in the example he's running a query that takes less than a second and gets it down to <250ms. Sure, it's not useful for transaction processing but I got many queries running on millions of rows where anything from a minute to an hour is more like it and milliseconds are peanuts. I would think most people have at least some reports that would benefit.
This one on the other hand seems like baby steps:
One rather enormous limitation of the current feature is that we only generate Gather nodes immediately on top of Parallel Seq Scan nodes. This means that this feature doesn't currently work for inheritance hierarchies (which are used to implement partitioned tables) because there would be an Append node in between. Nor is it possible to push a join down into the workers at present. (...) With things as they are, about the only case that benefits from this feature is a sequential scan of a table that cannot be index-accelerated but can be made faster by having multiple workers test the filter condition in parallel.
No partitioning, no joins, right now the only thing you can speed up is a simple table scan where you can't/won't use an index. This is more "proof of concept" parallelism than a useful feature right now. I guess in a release or two this will be a big thing.
If I recall correctly, you have the file in memory before you save it to disk. Check if the first bytes are 0x8950E4E70D0A1A0A and it should be "close enough".I'm not sure if anyone has compiled a list of headers and file extensions, but it seems a little overkill.
When this happens, and it will, the number one social concern will be to figure out how hard work can still be incented. Without hard work, humans become listless and unhappy. As gleeful as you are to disparage Puritans, they understood this aspect of human nature well. To use an example you're likely comfortable with, imagine those trust fund babies whose life lacking struggle results in them being intolerable douchebags.
They're douchebags because they're privileged enough to do what nobody else can and they know it. If being a deadbeat slacker was something everyone could do it wouldn't have the same effect. And I think you vastly underestimate how much people can find personal goals that don't contribute anything meaningful to society, I can totally waste a whole weekend doing nothing "productive" yet not be "listless and unhappy". Probably years too. I could easily get hooked on a MMORPG and spend 8 hours/day becoming the überlord of something. I'm just not in the addict phase where I'd quit my day job, but if I didn't need my day job....
Disclosing or dismissing? "Sure it has a few bugs, but I'm sure they'll get fixed soon and it's a great game 9/10", please put me on the exclusive interview/preview/kickback list and not the shit list for your next game. Game reviews don't have the greatest reputation for integrity, to say the least. Oddly enough launch sales are crazy high despite except for first to level in MMORPGs there's rarely any hurry. So if you give it a kick in the teeth because it's buggy and not very playable right now the publishers tend to not like you. And content is king, if you don't have anything special except the post-release reviews everyone can do you're likely to go out of business.
I guess we've met this guy. Apart from that, personally I'd like to ban the lone "=" operator so it's "==" for comparison, ":=" for assignment with all the other two char operators like != and += intact. So many languages try to be "smart" instead of just making the difference more explicit.
If ET were there, transmitting on RF with the same power we use for radio/TV signals - our detectors aren't even good enough to hear it over noise.
From what I understand it's primarily going to pick up military radar or intentional "pings", signal broadcast is very weak compared to radars trying to detect stealth aircraft that is diverting 99%+ of the signal away from the source. There's not really any reason to send radio/TV signals with that power and for information efficiency we're going to encode them so they're almost indistinguishable from noise anyway. The latter is obviously the best since they're the only ones likely to have any information content we could positively identify. So at least for our current level of technology they have to want to be found.
It works because people will pay for convenience and knowing exactly what your Internet bill will be can be worth more than any savings you might get if you stay under some sort of quota. Particularly when quotes are implemented with nasty overage fees instead of slowing you down to a crawl making you actively extend your quota and accept the charges. For example I subscribe to Spotify and if I forget it's running and it's streaming all night and all day while I'm at work with speakers muted it doesn't cost me a thing, if it was a PPV service and I'd get billed per song... no. Unless I'm subsidizing some really absurd excesses I'm happier with a flat rate, even if it gives a few heavy users a free ride.
While I agree with the basic sentiment, I have to ask one thing.
Of those hundreds of games society stands to lose forever, how many of those are actually worth remembering? How many of those would society care about if we kept them?
Considering how many people go nuts over a few recovered Doctor Who episodes or the IS blowing up a couple old ruins in Palmyra, I'd say a lot of people care. A friend of mine and I still like to retro game from time to time on a C64, I'll admit I would be rather sad if Bubble Bobble was lost forever. Sure, 90% of everything is shit but I think a lot of people would care if we lost some of the classics they played and enjoyed and we managed to just lose them forever. Guess it depends what you mean, the world wouldn't collapse if we lost Mozart or Elvis either but it'd be a poorer place.
Wondering out loud.... Could we not require cable companies to either turn off the "copy once" flag or have a viable freely available DVR solution that is certified to do the necessary DRM... Like having a closed source addition to the commonly available media solutions?
DRM relies on keeping a secret, being closed source is just a tool to obscure it. A small, closed source drop-in module would quickly get picked apart, the key(s) taken and the DRM broken. The more transparent the code, the more of the DRM must happen in hardware to be effective, like Firefox's DRM extensions. They don't actually contains the keys for anything, they just provide an interface to talk to the "trusted" hardware for keys. There is no DRM that can work in the open.
Right... and if anybody thinks the Middle-East->Balkans->Europe or S-America->Mexico->USA migration is a problem now try to imagine what it will be like when large of South America become deforested and the Middle East becomes an uninhabitable dustbowl. Everytime I hear somebody make that: "It's not our problem, let them kill themselves down there, the best thing we can do is not interfere" like the OP I'm tempted to bring up the mess that is Syria which to a large extent became the mess it is because we listened to people who recommend apathy. Interfering is bad but at least you have some influence on the course of events, not interfering is worse because by not interfering you let the situation spin completely out of control.
In case you haven't noticed, our interference has for the most part involved removing the dictators that had been suppressing the religious extremists since they were a threat to their own power, preventing it from spinning out of control. Somebody had a dream that the Middle East would turn into modern democracies like most of Eastern Europe if only they were removed, leading to everything from the Gulf War II to the Arab Spring. In retrospect, we can now say most of these efforts have been a horrible failure and cruel dictators have been replaced by a reign of terror by sadistic Islamist fundamentalists who will rape, kill, torture and blow up civilians including women and children and military alike in total disregard of human rights, rules of warfare and bask in their notoriety. Not even Hitler broadcast the Holocaust on YouTube. If I could go back in time I'd say bring back Saddam, Gadaffi, Assad, the Egyptian military junta and all the other bastards and don't kick the hornet's nest. None of these bastards were a threat to world peace, none of these bastards had any common cause except holding on to their own power. And they had a pretty good sense of self-preservation, which could be used to pressure them with sanctions and limit the atrocities. We took out the lesser evil so the greater evil could rise to power, if the alternative to a dictatorship is a theocracy apathy is a wise cause of action. In fact, that lesson should have been learned as far back as Afghanistan and Iran.
In a power-constrained scenario, then yes. Leakage is eating up any power efficiency you get from smaller features. Smaller chips are cheaper to produce - meaning we should get getting them cheaper or more of them if competition was good - but it still wouldn't make a processor do in 10W what last year's processor did with 15W. We're not quite at the end of the road yet but the fat lady is warming up, Intel missing their tick-tock with Kaby Lake is just the first sign.
How much does it cost to set up a chip fab? Me memory from a late 90s factoid was it was the Billion$ range, and with the ever-shrinking nanometer processes they keep coming up with it can't have gotten cheaper. When a major player goes bankrupt in a market like that it makes it much harder for anew guy to enter, because all the banker isn't stupid. If a company with decades of experience, existing fabs, etc. goes bankrupt, then the odds against our innovative new start-up have to be pretty bad, and a loan in that range has to be extremely fucking risky.
Except that AMD isn't in the chip manufacturing business anymore, that's TSMC, GloFo and Samsung and they split investment costs across the whole ARM market too. In fact, their 14/16nm process is more competitive with Intel than ever, it's AMD that needs to come up with some kick-ass designs. Of course laying out >1 billion transistors in an optimal way is roughly as hard as it sounds....
I don't understand, they were pretty upfront with what they had and what they want to try to do. Seems to me that is kind of the point of Crowd Funding, when you can't get real investors. Seriously, everyone seems to want guarantees about everything - lighten up people, if you want to have a guaranteed return by Treasury Bonds...
But you have two fundamentally different reasons for lack of "real investors", the market risk and the project risk. For example I backed a Kickstarter to create public domain recordings of classical music, extremely low project risk since such recordings are made all the time but clearly not a good economic investment. The game Elite: Dangerous would be somewhere in the middle, sure it's a new game but within a known genre and without any truly experimental technology. And then there's the ones that promise to do something revolutionary new, where you really should take their claims with a ton of salt. Unfortunately many see a presentation, some photoshopped pictures and a little hand-waving and think this is basically a pre-order when it's not.
A recent debate is that medical care is a "fundamental right". So I find myself in need of medical care, does that obligate the government to provide it? Who is the "government" anyway? Government is people. Do I have the right to another person's labor? Are other people obligated to provide me with their resources? That is what things like food, shelter, internet access, and medical care are, they are the time, labor, and resources of others.
I don't have a "fundamental right" to another person's stuff. Claiming such sounds a lot like, "to everyone according to their needs, from everyone according to their abilities." I'd bet that a lot of people don't even know where that phrase comes from or what it means. That phrase is what brought us Marxism, communism, and socialism.
Negative right = the government will not interfere. Positive right = the government will secure your right. If you're absolutely against positive rights, you're against many fundamental rights like the rule of law. If we can raise taxes for police, lawyers og judges to keep you from being murdered, why can't we raise taxes to keep you from starving, thirsting, freezing to death or dying for trivially cured injuries or disease? What you're rebelling against isn't socialism, it's civilization and democracy. It doesn't have to be pinko commie land, you didn't opt in to US law. You didn't opt in to the US tax code. They're part of society and you want out, a place where the government takes nothing "by force" even though it has public consent is a place with no government at all.
I have a right to free speech, does that mean the government must provide me with time on a radio station? I have the right to travel freely, does that obligate the government to buy me a car?
If there was no public roads, your "right to travel freely" would end at the end of your driveway. From there on out it would be a private conglomerate of road owners subject to their terms and conditions for use. Oh and for bonus points they'd also control any water and sewage pipes, electricity, phone, coax or fiber lines going in or out of your city block. What effectively lets you travel is that there's a whole lot of land that's a little bit yours - public property, provided and maintained by the government. If you want to write a letter to your Congressman the US postal service is compelled to deliver it. The phone service is a common carrier and can't refuse to connect you.
Those aren't rights though, they're services provided on a reasonable and non-discriminatory basis - and in some cases even subsidized - to provide opportunities to exercise those rights. And they're not free, you still have to pay postage and phone bills and get your own car - unless you take public transport that is also not free. Are they interfering in a free market? Absolutely. The postage clearly doesn't accurately reflect the actual geographic costs of sending mail, that is by design. How you manage to twist that into subsidies becoming propaganda tools? The postal service doesn't bill by the content, nor does the phone company and the electricity company doesn't ask what you plugged in. By your logic, we have to shut down the public roads because they encourage driving over flying.
And further in still is the complete failure to understand things like the up-front cost of a GPL project base is "disclosure", and that disclosure of those incremental changes is very cheap. Compare embedding linux kernels in things to the up-front and per-unit costs of Wince or VxWorks. Then really _think_ about how non-money-value your fix to that one serial driver really is compared to the item you wan to sell.
But that's pretending software already does 99,9% of the things you want to do. The reality is that for me, personally it's either Windows @ $109 and MS Office @ $149 or Linux and LibreOffice + $258 in custom development and that's not even a week's worth of minimum wage, much less a software professional at contracting rates. The burden is put on the one who commissions the code, but the benefits go to everyone. Sure there's crowdsourcing but then you're not in control of what happens and the incentive is still to wait and see if you can get somebody else to pay, while buying a finished solution you can test it and see that it works to your needs. It's not the disclosure that's being sold cheap, it's the accumulated value of refined, battle tested code that is given away for free to those who have contributed nothing to its existence.
Don't get me wrong, I get that's in the spirit of open/free software but it that doesn't change the fact that the per-copy charge helps distribute the development costs across more users who usually got some value from of the developments made, even though they wouldn't have carried the cost themselves. With open source, every time you run into a rough edge you usually have to apply the polish yourself, which is why many say "Linux is only free if your time is worthless", they all take some of your time but how much time matters. The good news is that you have the source and can always in theory fix it, but you can still burn a lot of money doing it.
'Free' may not quite mean free.
It means you can now advertise this in your resume, for example.
Sure but is it a race to the bottom? I mean the whole point is to offer something for cheap now to cash in later, lots of things are about that like oh every sale in existence. But it doesn't work if people are jumping in all the time thinking they'll be the next big thing, the next time you're making a "real" bid the next guy offers $1 and so it goes on and on. I mean $1 isn't ten minutes at minimum wage, it's way below any kind of living wage even eating Ramen noodles and living in your parent's basement. I have a friend who does music on a semi-professional basis, and yeah you can almost always get a free-ish band doing it for the exposure. And they've had to man up and say if that's what you want that's fine but it won't be our band. They've practiced many, many hours both alone and together and want to see some kind of pay-off but they're constantly in competition with bands that think this is their lottery ticket to stardom and will sell themselves very cheap. Like he commented on a local festival, he'd like to play for the local community but it'd have to be almost for free and the other bands don't get play time anywhere else and it would tarnish their reputation. The price tag is mostly about perception, a big name is worth a big price and then you can't act small.
Hasn't Google been testing out their cars in the real world? And if the wiki article is right they've driven over a million miles and only had 14 minor traffic accidents, none of which were the fault of the autonomous system (at least according to Google). If that is true and if my math is correct that puts their accidents per mile ratio at about 1 / 71,400. Again if my math is correct your average human vehicle experiences accidents at a rate of 1 / 66,700. Suggesting Googles autonomous vehicle is safer.
A much more interesting statistic that Google hasn't released is how often their engineers have either intervened or pre-emptively taken over control in order to avoid a potentially bad situation. Not to oversimplify what Google has done, but if I think of my commute to work and map it out to a computer with relatively simple rules like here's the lanes, there's an intersection and there's the light, there's a crossing that you don't pass until it's clear I would say at least 95/100 times it'd get by on very simple rules of the road. Of course since I make my commute ~200*2 = 400 times a year, I'd crash twenty times a year with that accuracy. So I don't really trust the car to handle all sorts of weird until they've told me that we kept the hands off the wheel and let it handle all sorts of weird, even if that looked like a really bad idea.
As trivial as this might seem, having games for linux might help bring in more of the youth crowd. Their comfort level with linux will increase and out of that user stream you'll develop more hardcore linux users. I doubt Steam thought about it that way but in the long run, it is really a smart thing for the future heath of the linux fan base.
They people running "SteamOS" for the most part won't give a shit about Linux as a desktop and never look under the hood. The primary advantage is that you'll get a lot more developers to write OpenGL games and support the graphics/multimedia parts of the stack that the server community don't care about and Android has only partly touched. Unless Valve wants to pull a little "Chromebook" move, say a switch that swaps between console mode and desktop mode and suddenly you have an alternate desktop for basic use. There's been so many failed incarnations of WebTV and friends though that they probably won't do that until it has a heavy presence as a console.