Orbits are many, valuable orbits not so much. The first few hundred kms are unusable due to atmospheric drag. Then comes LEO and the optimal solution is usually as close as possible, greater bandwidth/resolution, lower latency, shorter orbital period and more payload, less fuel. Then a lot of empty space before GEO, which is obviously quite narrow because otherwise it wouldn't be geo-synchronous and everyone who wants to receive signals need a much more expensive and complicated tracking antenna and multiple satellites to keep 24x7 coverage. True there's certain differences with frequency bands as well, but not anything like in space.
I'd rather just invest in cell phone towers (you can daisy chain these with point-to-point beams if cables are unfeasible/too expensive) and smartphones. Some 92% of the world's population is already covered by a cell phone signal, more people in India have cell phones than running water. They just don't use it for the Internet, yet. Because I really doubt the world's poor is going to have satellite reception equipment, this will be a fixed thing for schools and such. But then you'd probably do just as well using the cell phone network as the "last mile" and have a few big Internet gateways to the sky.
More like there's a ton of markets that Apple choose not to compete in and if you want to force a square peg into a round hole it gets real expensive. Like not offering a machine with drive bays, if you want more than one drive you should buy some wildly expensive Thunderbolt 2 enclosure. Or offering any cheap solutions, no cheap HDDs, no cheap screens, it's all high end or not at all. But their laptops are pretty much the same as everybody else's, the form factor hasn't allowed them to turn it into an art project. If I was in the market for a $1000+ laptop I'd consider a MacBook no matter what OS I was going to run on it. Not least because I could change my mind, even though dual booting (or even triple booting) is a hassle.
First and foremost, if the whole shit that went down in Paris proved anything then that no matter what freedoms you relinquish, you don't buy security with it. France has about the broadest surveillance laws in the EU and the most ridiculous limitations on encryption, and it meant jack shit. Personally I consider it amazing that something that proved without a doubt that total surveillance serves no purpose in terms of terrorism prevention can be used as an argument for MORE privacy erosion.
Why? In many markets where meaningful competition is hard to achieve you see that in Europe where it's more regulated consumers have it better and in the US where it's less regulated consumers have it worse. Yet despite all evidence to the contrary you have a very vocal libertarian crowd who claim the answer is more deregulation. "It doesn't work, lets do more of it" is what happens when you're blinded by ideology. To continue Lisa's story:
Homer: Not a bear in sight. The Bear Patrol must be working like a charm. Lisa: That's specious reasoning, Dad. Homer: Thank you, dear. Lisa: By your logic I could claim that this rock keeps tigers away. Homer: Oh, how does it work? Lisa: It doesn't work. Homer: Uh-huh. Lisa: It's just a stupid rock. Homer: Uh-huh. Lisa: But I don't see any tigers around, do you? [Homer thinks of this, then pulls out some money] Homer: Lisa, I want to buy your rock. [Lisa refuses at first, then takes the exchange]
*Bear shows up* Homer: The rock is not working. Lisa: I told you that it didn't? Homer: We need more rocks! Lisa: Have you listened to anything I said? Homer: Please Lisa, we need those rocks. Lisa (picks up rocks): But they're just ordinary rocks. Homer: Shut up and take my money! [Lisa shrugs, then takes the exchange]
Unfortunately, you and the video are focusing on the wrong metric. Things like child mortality, starvation, access to clean water, housing, etc. can all be artificially skewed by foreign aid. The one true metric that matters is productivity per person.
Depends on your perspective. In my country about 2% of the population is employed in agriculture. While we do need productive land, fertilizer, machinery and so on I'm pretty sure we could do better with 3%. So does anyone need to starve? I fail to see the big principal and moral difference between propping up a disabled person at home and a foreigner who for some reason also can't support himself.
Giving people in developing countries medical care, food, clean water, and modern conveniences is pointless if they're going to continue to be dependent on foreign charity for those things in perpetuity. The primary goal of foreign assistance should always be domestic economic development
Well, we also know that people who do get the "modern conveniences" are also more likely to pop out 1-3 children than 4-10 in order to support their old age. So we might be reducing the burden on ourselves long term, assuming we want to give everyone the basic needs. It might not be earned, but it might still be logical for us to do so. Basically, it comes down to Africa as on six continents population growth is fairly well in hand. It might be better to just bring them up to speed ASAP rather than turning millions into billions needing help.
Not to mention that if US companies are supposed to "patriotically" enable and support access to encrypted communications to US officials the same goes for other countries. I'm sure he would not be ok at all with China stating that all Chinese hardware manufacturers should "patriotically" implement some solution to allow the Chinese government access.
And this is where it all starts to break down, it's better applied to close allies. Does the EU want the US listening in on all their phone calls? Does the US want the EU listening in on all their phone calls? We probably don't and an intercept-free solution is probably a download away with open source.
I've never seen a penis or vagina produce any code, so we don't need more women in tech, we need more competent people in tech. Competent people like my mother, my boss Rachel, and myself. Rachel has helped solve some tough problems at work. She's never used her boobs to do so, meaning they just aren't relevant.
Well, they do seem to produce an awful lot of DNA code and you'll never find "programmers" more protective of their work, even though one only updates the code once a month and the other is just spewing it out to see what sticks. And they are extremely proud when a million monkeys (not sure where the typewriters come in) do produce a Shakespeare.
P.S. I know it's technically the testicles and ovaries, but lighten up...
This is actually a case where government regulation works, here in Norway there's a "reservation registry" against telemarketing, fixed and mobile phones. About 2.1 out of 5 million inhabitants have registered, never get any telemarketing calls. You can optionally reserve against ideal organizations too, though you can't reserve against surveys. There's a loophole for "existing business relationships" but it's pretty narrow and since that means you actually have business with them they're quite responsive to take you off any list to continue that business. Not that they have any choice either.
[Col. Vaselov, a Russian recruit for the SGC, is insulted when O'Neill denies his request to join SG-1] Dr. Jackson: Yeah, don't take General O'Neill's decision personally. Col. Vaselov: Frankly, his attitude is offensive. It leads me to wonder if he knows the cold war is over. Dr. Jackson: His attitude has nothing to do with you being Russian. He's an equal opportunity offender.
Sugar coating it just leads to people not getting the message, as long as you treat all the same no matter what sex or color or religion or whatnot they belong to - including not using that as derogative - it's fine with me. Same as when you won't fail people because that's not nice so a D is now the new F or refusing to time a children's race because they're all winners.
I remember when there was a big article and discussion about whether you could chastise other people's kids when they were being brats in your house. Most were on the "my house, my rules" side but some were in the "don't you dare, I choose how to raise my kids" corner too. Seriously, like you expect to be the sole judge of their behavior until they're 18? Hell no.
You might not like other people's opinion much, particularly if it's negative but it's also part of growing up - figuring out who is worth listening to and who is not. And who is just being a dick trying to make you do a dare or peer pressure or consequences like getting grounded and getting bad grades. "Tough, but fair" should be a honorific, at least compared to the wishy-washy people who'll spout vague positive encouragement no matter what.
Just note that seizure laws are as old as the constitution and the Supreme Court has never interpreted the 4th amendment that way. Example cases are "The Palmyra, 25 U.S. (12 Wheat) 1 (1827)." where they seized a pirate ship originally owned by Spain but was operating on its own. Or "Dobbins's Distillery v. United States, 96 U.S. 395, 24 L.Ed. 637 (1878)" where they ceased property of the man who'd leased out his property for a distillery. In "254 U.S. 505, 41 S.Ct. 189, 65 L.Ed. 376 (1921)" a taxicab used to transport illegal liquor was seized. In "Calero Toledo v. Pearson Yacht Leasing Co., 416 U.S. 663 (1974)" they cease a yacht because the people leasing it had one marijuana cigarette. There's 200 years of precedent saying they can cease property even though the owner is innocent.
What seems to be fundamentally different is that most the recent cases seem to involve seizures where there's no real evidence of a primary crime in which the property was an "accessory". "Preponderance of evidence" has basically been replaced by speculation and accusation with no basis in fact. A conviction has never been a formal requirement, say they try to stop a car at a border crossing, the driver makes a getaway, abandons the car and is never found or convicted. In this case they would seize the car as objectively used for drug smuggling even though no person could be convicted for the crime. But when there's not the slightest hint of link to a crime, that's just wrong.
It also gets better, there's no need for the seized property to be instrumental in the crime.
The dissent argues that our cases treat contraband differently from instrumentalities used to convey contraband, like cars: Objects in the former class are forfeitable "however blameless or unknowing their owners may be," post, at 2, but with respect to an instrumentality in the latter class, an owner's innocence is no defense only to the "principal use being made of that property," id., at 4. However, this Court's precedent has never made the due process inquiry depend on whether the use for which the instrumentality was forfeited was the principal use. If it had, perhaps cases like Calero Toledo, in which Justice Douglas noted in dissent that there was no showing that the "yacht had been notoriously used in smuggling drugs . . . and so far as we know only one marihuana cigarette was found on the yacht,"
Basically if you got a friend riding your car and you get stopped for any reason and they find a joint on your friend your car can be ceased under drug laws, there's no requirement that it be instrumental in transporting drugs. Same if you got a friend or family member visiting, your house is now a de facto drug stash even though it was on their person the whole time.
In any event, for the reasons pointed out in Calero Toledo and Van Oster, forfeiture also serves a deterrent purpose distinct from any punitive purpose. Forfeiture of property prevents illegal uses "both by preventing further illicit use of the [property] and by imposing an economic penalty, thereby rendering illegal behavior unprofitable." Calero Toledo, supra, at 687. (...) "The law thus builds a secondary defense against a forbidden use and precludes evasions by dispensing with the necessity of judicial inquiry as to collusion between the wrongdoer and the alleged innocent owner."
Basically it's the "nuke it from orbit" theory, anything found in the vicinity of a crime gets caught in the blast wave. It doesn't matter if it was your property and you're innocent, if bank robbers steal your car and use it in a bank robbery clearly you should lose your car right? Your fault for letting it get stolen and be used to rob a bank, you pay the price.
The dissent also suggests that The Palmyra line of cases "would justify the confiscation of an ocean liner just because one of its passengers sinned while on board." Post, at 5. None of our cases have held that an ocean liner may be confiscated because of the activities of one passenger. We said in Goldsmith Grant, and we repeat here, that "[w]hen such application shall be made it will be time enough to pronounce upon it."
Well, AMD certainly has their own less than stellar moves too. Ever since AMD bought ATI in 2006 they've been talking about synergies but to be honest, I'm not seeing it. An "APU" performs very, very similar to the same CPU+GPU if you compare cores on the CPU side and shaders on the GPU side. They talk a lot of heterogeneous computing, but apart from their own tech demonstrations there's hardly any software written with custom code paths just for AMD and only their APUs.
AMD could have licensed GPU designs from both ATI and nVidia and had both as allies against Intel. They could have used the billions they spent on the ATI deal to counter Intel Core with better process technology or new CPU designs instead of playing with graphics. Instead they pot committed to ATI and paired one underdog with another underdog giving Intel+nVidia every reason to put the thumbscrews on them. And if they were afraid Microsoft would buy out ATI, then nVidia would have been their new best friend. I guess AMD had a bad case of hubris.
Well, they usually just let it fall in the ocean so I don't quite see the big risk they're taking here. The rocket will be FUBAR anyway, the barge is basically a bulk metal piece and I assume that if they were looking at a high speed impact they would have fired the engines to avoid significantly damaging/sinking the barge. The money is spend on all the R&D on engine control, fins, legs and whatnot. They got nothing to lose in the actual landing attempt, basically they get a free shot with every rocket they send up that doesn't max out the payload capacity.
Yeah, going for it is pretty damn tough but once they've committed they can't really pussyfoot around. What I do like is the open attitude though, it's not like a sealed accident report or anything it's SpaceX publishing a video "Hey, look at our rocket blow up!" and it's cool. In fact, I think they might get more appreciation when they do get the landing right than if they'd done it on the first try and made it look easy. Now it's more like it is really hard and if you screw up even a little here's what happens it goes boom. I sure think their PR department knows what they're doing.
Perhaps the placement of the antenna was a design flaw? Placement of the antenna that did not depend on success of unfurling is a lesson learned.
Well, since that's going to charge the batteries all you'd get is a "hey here I am oh wait why are my batteries draining gotta go kthxbye", a little easier to debug I guess but pretty much just as catastrophic.
yet as a proprietary application expects in this case to invoke the GPL mantra of usability without warranty
If you think the GPL invented that mantra, you must be smoking the good stuff. All (normal COTS) software comes with the "we take as little legal responsibility as at all possible" and it's because of crackpot legal systems like the US. Be glad that you can just throw software out there, otherwise writing software would be high liability sport only for those with deep pockets or nothing to lose.
Low earth orbit (LEO) is not a big threat, even a major clusterfuck would be resolved in a couple decades as the debris burns up in the athmosphere. The only way ISS stays in the sky is because of constant boosts by visiting space ships. satellites similarly have built in thrusters for their design life. In GEO on the other hand the orbit is stable for centuries and fucking up bad there would plague us for a very long time.
Last time I went there I needed a 1/8" audio jack and some solder. It was great, I don't know where else I could have gotten those things in 20 minutes, but $8/year doesn't keep a store open, and the times I need those connectors are few and far between.
Yeah, a big margin on a small item doesn't help much. I remember this one time I was out of batteries for my WiiMotes and with kids that really wanted to play, found some at a nearby camping kiosk. Actually they didn't really carry it, her son just had some extra and we paid about 5x the supermarket price. My friend thought that was bizarrely expensive, I was just like it's Sunday afternoon, we got it without driving ages and it's not like she's going to get rich selling one pack of batteries. One buck for the batteries and four bucks for being there at the right time, in the right place when we needed them.
I see the same thing with retail computer stores too, they charge a bundle for a cable. But then I think, well I wouldn't go there except to buy a cable so instead of paying rent and salary off a $300 GPU sale they need to do it off a $5 cable. No wonder they need to have a big margin. And in many other cases people go "browsing" the retail store then go home and order it online. If I was to go into retail, I'd stay way out of those businesses and find something you'd want to buy on site.
Agreed. Also, I don't ever recall return on investment as being one of the selling points of BitCoin in the first place. It was meant as an alternative to currency, not an investment vehicle. Even if the value dropped to parity with the US Dollar or below, it would still retain its initial utility. So again, nothing lost.
Except that for a currency to work somebody has to be sitting on it, no matter how fast you shuffle it around. If everybody's hoarding it because the value keeps rising that's not great for circulation, but some will look to cash in their earnings and keep at least a trickle going. If the value keeps dropping there's no floor, if it drops from $1000 to $1 what makes you think it won't drop to $0.001? I suppose that eventually you'll hit some kind of die-hard fanatics who'll scoop it up against all reason like the penny stock of an impending bankruptcy, but I don't know anyone with serious money who'll sit on something that's losing value every day.
I mean if you own BitCoins today there's really three ways to think about it: 1) I'm speculating that it'll rebound eventually, I'd be a fool to sell out at the bottom 2) It'll keep dropping, so I should cash out now while they're still worth something 3) It'll magically become stable-ish so I should just keep it for when I want to buy stuff.
I mean you need pretty strong drugs to be in the third group, it's like taking the expected value of a lottery ticket. Very soon you'll either have lots of money or no money, that it's going to break even is all but impossible. And if you're going to do real world conversions all the time to avoid holding bitcoins, then you've really just invented a very annoying way to do currency trading.
4) Though it doesn't apply to people outside of the/. crowd so much, I love building/upgrading my own systems, it's fun and cheap.
I think the excitement over finally getting a faster computer used to get me on a mental high that lasted through the assembly like a kid waiting for Christmas presents, but these days I just want to get it over with and the damn thing to work. I only do it because it's the only way to get the components I want, looked it over now and still can't find a PC builder that'll give me this GTX 970 SLI setup. I could almost get the same single card setup except they didn't have the SSD I want, which means they can't install the OS and I actually kept my 16GB of RAM from 2011, obviously to get an all new PC it comes with RAM. And when I bought it the 970s weren't in the builder at all.
I really thought the last PC I built was going to be the last one I'd bother with. Now I'm thinking the same thing again. We'll see in another 5+ years when this one is starting to sag, I suspect that I once again will want something that doesn't quite fit their semi-custom models. Not that this was my most successful build either, if I had to go it again I'd pick the Fractal Define XL over the regular one, with full size graphics card those extra 4 cm of depth would have made it so much easier to work with, now the graphics cards are basically snuggling the HDD cage. Still works quite nicely though.
Also this isn't a problem in Linux because either you're usually installing from a repo or source, of which the requirement for any repo package or code base isn't going to be libtrackingmalwarelolpwn(64 bit; of course).
When Ubuntu by default will send anything you search for locally to Amazon for sponsored results there's shades of gray pretty much everywhere. All the hidden ways they try to make money off you are often more dirty than just asking you outright to pay. Like many freemium games, you make a fun game that'll turn into a slow and pointless grind unless you pay up. It's your basic bait and switch turned into a business model.
You can try 10 Technical Preview. It is Windows 8.1 with Metro condensed to a start menu. It still has some full-screen hijacking apps and tons of bloat from Bing and the "App" Store. This might be ok for some people but it sounds like Microsoft is going down the wrong road for those of us that like a clean, controlled, and predictable system. Linux may be the answer for many if it has the right program support, but it's possible that 7 is the last sane OS from Microsoft.
Windows 10 looks quite okay, I'll install Chrome (no IE), MPC-HC (no WMP), 7zip, Notepad++, XnView etc. instead of the bundled apps and be fine I think, unlike Win8 it looks like it can work mostly the same except with a tile menu as long as you stay away from the Metro apps. The important thing is that it runs all my existing Windows applications and I get security patches, I don't really care about Microsoft's agenda. I already abandoned jumped to Linux once over Vista but came back for 7, this time I'll just wait it out. I'm assuming that before EOL of Windows 7 they'll provide some kind of "traditional desktop" upgrade path for conservative businesses, particularly now that Nadella is CEO. I'm not in a hurry, Win7 works well and there's no pressing need to upgrade.
A conservative's overall goal is to preserve the status quo, they're reactionary (looking to prevent change) rather than radical (looking to provoke change) but they can be just as extreme in justifying means to an end. Fundamentalists for example are in general conservatives, they want you to keep living exactly by 1000+ year old books. For some that means living like the Amish, others use camera phones to post beheading videos on YouTube. The full scale from embracement to rejection to eradication is justified as means to an end, they can be every bit as crazy as radicals.
The fundamental concept of a warrant goes all the way back to the bill of rights and probably further, there was never an absolute right to privacy. Modern encryption is often rendering warrants meaningless, sure you can wave a piece of paper but the modern day "letter" is wrapped in a safe you couldn't blow up with dynamite and the key only exists in my head, the world has changed whether the conservatives want it to or not. What they want is to turn back time, what they end up doing is either abolishing warrants or abolishing private communications. It's not like one is significantly less conservative than the other, they're both long standing customs.
I'm serious, but you are right. In the near future, spinning disks will be used for the same applications and seen as the dinosaur of technology: backup and low-performance works. The truth of the matter is that spinning disks are simply to slow for modern day technology. Compare your laptop when using a 7200rpm disk or an SSD. Compare your Oracle database query times when using a legacy storage vendor or an all flash array that can do 1 million IOPS . It is the performance aspect that matters in modern day computing. The bottleneck is storage, not your CPU, not your memory, storage.
Except that using a computer to store your family photos is a very valid use case, it doesn't have to be about "computing". When people play Angry Birds they're battery bound, when people stream Netflix they're bandwidth bound, when people play FPS games they're GPU bound, when old people want big screens with big text they're interface bound. And I'm sure there's people doing weather simulations that'll say they're CPU/memory bound. Yes, if you measured the time the average desktop user spent waiting for IO before SSDs it was significant, but I got my first one 5+ years ago so it's getting history.
Today a modern SSD can do 10000 IOPS at QD=1 with a average response time of <0.05 ms. Or in layman's speak, near instant. For an enterprise database sure 1 million IOPS is nice, but would the average user notice the difference if you could put one in his laptop? I think not. Even in the enterprise it's getting to be a replacement for poor optimization and running bad SQL, sometimes I really feel like replacing our dev environment's disks with a single 5400 RPM HDD so maybe we'd get rid of the worst offenses. A lot of people are simply incapable of designing and querying large databases efficiently because table scans worked so well on the small stuff.
Practically I don't feel it's very significantly different anymore. Sure a little faster CPU, a little faster GPU, a little more RAM, bigger and cheaper SSDs but it's mostly the same. To feel that big a difference what you had before must have been rather crap, I still remember how adding a Gravis Ultrasound turned PC sound from shit to excellent. Or adding a new graphics card so you could have transparent, splashing water in Morrowind. Getting a floppy drive for my C64 so I didn't have to wait ages for the tape player. I hereby predict this will be the least exciting decade for storage, except the ones that follow it.
Why libinput integration in KWin? KWin/Wayland already supported input handling by being a Wayland client and connecting to a Seat. But especially for pointer events this was not sufficient at all. We have quite some code where we warp the pointer and Wayland doesnâ(TM)t support this (and shouldn't). Warping the pointer is normally considered evil as it can introduce quite some problems if applications are allowed to warp the pointer. E.g. it can create security issues if you start typing your password and a malicious applications warps the pointer to trick you entering your password into a password field of the malicious application. Also from a usabililty perspective it can be problematic as it makes the system behave in an unpredictable way.
I think the "and shouldn't" part is wrong. The next paragraph goes on to say why a window manager/compositor needs it. And to quote a 10 year old post, here's reasons why an application might need it:
There are applications where pointer warping is beneficial. Most have to do with tracking mouse movement to move a camera in a 3-d viewing context. For instance to look around a 3d world, using the mouse to point the camera. One can just compare the pointer position to the previous position to get a vector to rotate the camera, however this will fail when the pointer reaches the edge of the screen, and no more motion in that axis will be detected. With pointer warping, one can disable the drawing of the pointer, warp it to the center of the screen and just calculate thier movement vector based on the position of the pointer from the center of the screen, and warp the pointer back to the center of the screen. One now has full freedom to rotate the camera with the mouse. This is a useful feature in 3d games, 3d modelviewing, virtual tours, and many other 3d applications.
Also useful for trapping the cursor in a VM, if you want the edges. Another application I can think of is trying to select a region from a large image that requires scrolling. Usually that involves button press and hold, moving the cursor to the edge of the image carefully avoiding moving off the image and waiting until it scrolls for you. It would be a lot more elegant if it could just restrict the pointer to the image while you're doing your hold so hitting the edge and beyond would scroll the image directly. Once you release the button (or cancel the operation, typically ESC) the pointer is freed again. Of course the downsides is that an evil application can warp it maliciously and a broken application can trap your pointer. Still, this seems something better managed by an client security profiles than bypassing it by grabbing input altogether. And the compositor may have a "failsafe" key combo to detach the pointer from a malfunctioning application.
The other use case mentioned with global shortcuts is also the same, for a test/automation framework it could be useful to launch a child application while controlling its input and output. But obviously you can also launch the browser in a password-stealing keylogger wrapper, that would be bad. So again, security profiles? This is a compositor, when I sudo apt-get install it'll ask for extra permissions. Compromise my browser/mail client? No permission to warp pointer. This just seems to break the encapsulation that Wayland is trying to provide, here's your display and here's your input. Imagine for example a multiseat setup where all the devices don't belong to you, by grabbing input directly you're circumventing that. And say Wayland does something like rotate/zoom your display, you bypass any translation the display server does. That seems rather messy.
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Orbits are many, valuable orbits not so much. The first few hundred kms are unusable due to atmospheric drag. Then comes LEO and the optimal solution is usually as close as possible, greater bandwidth/resolution, lower latency, shorter orbital period and more payload, less fuel. Then a lot of empty space before GEO, which is obviously quite narrow because otherwise it wouldn't be geo-synchronous and everyone who wants to receive signals need a much more expensive and complicated tracking antenna and multiple satellites to keep 24x7 coverage. True there's certain differences with frequency bands as well, but not anything like in space.
I'd rather just invest in cell phone towers (you can daisy chain these with point-to-point beams if cables are unfeasible/too expensive) and smartphones. Some 92% of the world's population is already covered by a cell phone signal, more people in India have cell phones than running water. They just don't use it for the Internet, yet. Because I really doubt the world's poor is going to have satellite reception equipment, this will be a fixed thing for schools and such. But then you'd probably do just as well using the cell phone network as the "last mile" and have a few big Internet gateways to the sky.
More like there's a ton of markets that Apple choose not to compete in and if you want to force a square peg into a round hole it gets real expensive. Like not offering a machine with drive bays, if you want more than one drive you should buy some wildly expensive Thunderbolt 2 enclosure. Or offering any cheap solutions, no cheap HDDs, no cheap screens, it's all high end or not at all. But their laptops are pretty much the same as everybody else's, the form factor hasn't allowed them to turn it into an art project. If I was in the market for a $1000+ laptop I'd consider a MacBook no matter what OS I was going to run on it. Not least because I could change my mind, even though dual booting (or even triple booting) is a hassle.
First and foremost, if the whole shit that went down in Paris proved anything then that no matter what freedoms you relinquish, you don't buy security with it. France has about the broadest surveillance laws in the EU and the most ridiculous limitations on encryption, and it meant jack shit. Personally I consider it amazing that something that proved without a doubt that total surveillance serves no purpose in terms of terrorism prevention can be used as an argument for MORE privacy erosion.
Why? In many markets where meaningful competition is hard to achieve you see that in Europe where it's more regulated consumers have it better and in the US where it's less regulated consumers have it worse. Yet despite all evidence to the contrary you have a very vocal libertarian crowd who claim the answer is more deregulation. "It doesn't work, lets do more of it" is what happens when you're blinded by ideology. To continue Lisa's story:
Homer: Not a bear in sight. The Bear Patrol must be working like a charm.
Lisa: That's specious reasoning, Dad.
Homer: Thank you, dear.
Lisa: By your logic I could claim that this rock keeps tigers away.
Homer: Oh, how does it work?
Lisa: It doesn't work.
Homer: Uh-huh.
Lisa: It's just a stupid rock.
Homer: Uh-huh.
Lisa: But I don't see any tigers around, do you?
[Homer thinks of this, then pulls out some money]
Homer: Lisa, I want to buy your rock.
[Lisa refuses at first, then takes the exchange]
*Bear shows up*
Homer: The rock is not working.
Lisa: I told you that it didn't?
Homer: We need more rocks!
Lisa: Have you listened to anything I said?
Homer: Please Lisa, we need those rocks.
Lisa (picks up rocks): But they're just ordinary rocks.
Homer: Shut up and take my money!
[Lisa shrugs, then takes the exchange]
Unfortunately, you and the video are focusing on the wrong metric. Things like child mortality, starvation, access to clean water, housing, etc. can all be artificially skewed by foreign aid. The one true metric that matters is productivity per person.
Depends on your perspective. In my country about 2% of the population is employed in agriculture. While we do need productive land, fertilizer, machinery and so on I'm pretty sure we could do better with 3%. So does anyone need to starve? I fail to see the big principal and moral difference between propping up a disabled person at home and a foreigner who for some reason also can't support himself.
Giving people in developing countries medical care, food, clean water, and modern conveniences is pointless if they're going to continue to be dependent on foreign charity for those things in perpetuity. The primary goal of foreign assistance should always be domestic economic development
Well, we also know that people who do get the "modern conveniences" are also more likely to pop out 1-3 children than 4-10 in order to support their old age. So we might be reducing the burden on ourselves long term, assuming we want to give everyone the basic needs. It might not be earned, but it might still be logical for us to do so. Basically, it comes down to Africa as on six continents population growth is fairly well in hand. It might be better to just bring them up to speed ASAP rather than turning millions into billions needing help.
Not to mention that if US companies are supposed to "patriotically" enable and support access to encrypted communications to US officials the same goes for other countries. I'm sure he would not be ok at all with China stating that all Chinese hardware manufacturers should "patriotically" implement some solution to allow the Chinese government access.
And this is where it all starts to break down, it's better applied to close allies. Does the EU want the US listening in on all their phone calls? Does the US want the EU listening in on all their phone calls? We probably don't and an intercept-free solution is probably a download away with open source.
I've never seen a penis or vagina produce any code, so we don't need more women in tech, we need more competent people in tech. Competent people like my mother, my boss Rachel, and myself. Rachel has helped solve some tough problems at work. She's never used her boobs to do so, meaning they just aren't relevant.
Well, they do seem to produce an awful lot of DNA code and you'll never find "programmers" more protective of their work, even though one only updates the code once a month and the other is just spewing it out to see what sticks. And they are extremely proud when a million monkeys (not sure where the typewriters come in) do produce a Shakespeare.
P.S. I know it's technically the testicles and ovaries, but lighten up...
Blame the NSA, the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory clearly says Normal Person + Anonymity + Audience = Total fuckwad.
This is actually a case where government regulation works, here in Norway there's a "reservation registry" against telemarketing, fixed and mobile phones. About 2.1 out of 5 million inhabitants have registered, never get any telemarketing calls. You can optionally reserve against ideal organizations too, though you can't reserve against surveys. There's a loophole for "existing business relationships" but it's pretty narrow and since that means you actually have business with them they're quite responsive to take you off any list to continue that business. Not that they have any choice either.
I like this quote from Stargate SG-1:
[Col. Vaselov, a Russian recruit for the SGC, is insulted when O'Neill denies his request to join SG-1]
Dr. Jackson: Yeah, don't take General O'Neill's decision personally.
Col. Vaselov: Frankly, his attitude is offensive. It leads me to wonder if he knows the cold war is over.
Dr. Jackson: His attitude has nothing to do with you being Russian. He's an equal opportunity offender.
Sugar coating it just leads to people not getting the message, as long as you treat all the same no matter what sex or color or religion or whatnot they belong to - including not using that as derogative - it's fine with me. Same as when you won't fail people because that's not nice so a D is now the new F or refusing to time a children's race because they're all winners.
I remember when there was a big article and discussion about whether you could chastise other people's kids when they were being brats in your house. Most were on the "my house, my rules" side but some were in the "don't you dare, I choose how to raise my kids" corner too. Seriously, like you expect to be the sole judge of their behavior until they're 18? Hell no.
You might not like other people's opinion much, particularly if it's negative but it's also part of growing up - figuring out who is worth listening to and who is not. And who is just being a dick trying to make you do a dare or peer pressure or consequences like getting grounded and getting bad grades. "Tough, but fair" should be a honorific, at least compared to the wishy-washy people who'll spout vague positive encouragement no matter what.
Just note that seizure laws are as old as the constitution and the Supreme Court has never interpreted the 4th amendment that way. Example cases are "The Palmyra, 25 U.S. (12 Wheat) 1 (1827)." where they seized a pirate ship originally owned by Spain but was operating on its own. Or "Dobbins's Distillery v. United States, 96 U.S. 395, 24 L.Ed. 637 (1878)" where they ceased property of the man who'd leased out his property for a distillery. In "254 U.S. 505, 41 S.Ct. 189, 65 L.Ed. 376 (1921)" a taxicab used to transport illegal liquor was seized. In "Calero Toledo v. Pearson Yacht Leasing Co., 416 U.S. 663 (1974)" they cease a yacht because the people leasing it had one marijuana cigarette. There's 200 years of precedent saying they can cease property even though the owner is innocent.
What seems to be fundamentally different is that most the recent cases seem to involve seizures where there's no real evidence of a primary crime in which the property was an "accessory". "Preponderance of evidence" has basically been replaced by speculation and accusation with no basis in fact. A conviction has never been a formal requirement, say they try to stop a car at a border crossing, the driver makes a getaway, abandons the car and is never found or convicted. In this case they would seize the car as objectively used for drug smuggling even though no person could be convicted for the crime. But when there's not the slightest hint of link to a crime, that's just wrong.
It also gets better, there's no need for the seized property to be instrumental in the crime.
The dissent argues that our cases treat contraband differently from instrumentalities used to convey contraband, like cars: Objects in the former class are forfeitable "however blameless or unknowing their owners may be," post, at 2, but with respect to an instrumentality in the latter class, an owner's innocence is no defense only to the "principal use being made of that property," id., at 4. However, this Court's precedent has never made the due process inquiry depend on whether the use for which the instrumentality was forfeited was the principal use. If it had, perhaps cases like Calero Toledo, in which Justice Douglas noted in dissent that there was no showing that the "yacht had been notoriously used in smuggling drugs . . . and so far as we know only one marihuana cigarette was found on the yacht,"
Basically if you got a friend riding your car and you get stopped for any reason and they find a joint on your friend your car can be ceased under drug laws, there's no requirement that it be instrumental in transporting drugs. Same if you got a friend or family member visiting, your house is now a de facto drug stash even though it was on their person the whole time.
In any event, for the reasons pointed out in Calero Toledo and Van Oster, forfeiture also serves a deterrent purpose distinct from any punitive purpose. Forfeiture of property prevents illegal uses "both by preventing further illicit use of the [property] and by imposing an economic penalty, thereby rendering illegal behavior unprofitable." Calero Toledo, supra, at 687. (...) "The law thus builds a secondary defense against a forbidden use and precludes evasions by dispensing with the necessity of judicial inquiry as to collusion between the wrongdoer and the alleged innocent owner."
Basically it's the "nuke it from orbit" theory, anything found in the vicinity of a crime gets caught in the blast wave. It doesn't matter if it was your property and you're innocent, if bank robbers steal your car and use it in a bank robbery clearly you should lose your car right? Your fault for letting it get stolen and be used to rob a bank, you pay the price.
The dissent also suggests that The Palmyra line of cases "would justify the confiscation of an ocean liner just because one of its passengers sinned while on board." Post, at 5. None of our cases have held that an ocean liner may be confiscated because of the activities of one passenger. We said in Goldsmith Grant, and we repeat here, that "[w]hen such application shall be made it will be time enough to pronounce upon it."
Is it time yet?
Well, AMD certainly has their own less than stellar moves too. Ever since AMD bought ATI in 2006 they've been talking about synergies but to be honest, I'm not seeing it. An "APU" performs very, very similar to the same CPU+GPU if you compare cores on the CPU side and shaders on the GPU side. They talk a lot of heterogeneous computing, but apart from their own tech demonstrations there's hardly any software written with custom code paths just for AMD and only their APUs.
AMD could have licensed GPU designs from both ATI and nVidia and had both as allies against Intel. They could have used the billions they spent on the ATI deal to counter Intel Core with better process technology or new CPU designs instead of playing with graphics. Instead they pot committed to ATI and paired one underdog with another underdog giving Intel+nVidia every reason to put the thumbscrews on them. And if they were afraid Microsoft would buy out ATI, then nVidia would have been their new best friend. I guess AMD had a bad case of hubris.
Well, they usually just let it fall in the ocean so I don't quite see the big risk they're taking here. The rocket will be FUBAR anyway, the barge is basically a bulk metal piece and I assume that if they were looking at a high speed impact they would have fired the engines to avoid significantly damaging/sinking the barge. The money is spend on all the R&D on engine control, fins, legs and whatnot. They got nothing to lose in the actual landing attempt, basically they get a free shot with every rocket they send up that doesn't max out the payload capacity.
Yeah, going for it is pretty damn tough but once they've committed they can't really pussyfoot around. What I do like is the open attitude though, it's not like a sealed accident report or anything it's SpaceX publishing a video "Hey, look at our rocket blow up!" and it's cool. In fact, I think they might get more appreciation when they do get the landing right than if they'd done it on the first try and made it look easy. Now it's more like it is really hard and if you screw up even a little here's what happens it goes boom. I sure think their PR department knows what they're doing.
Perhaps the placement of the antenna was a design flaw? Placement of the antenna that did not depend on success of unfurling is a lesson learned.
Well, since that's going to charge the batteries all you'd get is a "hey here I am oh wait why are my batteries draining gotta go kthxbye", a little easier to debug I guess but pretty much just as catastrophic.
yet as a proprietary application expects in this case to invoke the GPL mantra of usability without warranty
If you think the GPL invented that mantra, you must be smoking the good stuff. All (normal COTS) software comes with the "we take as little legal responsibility as at all possible" and it's because of crackpot legal systems like the US. Be glad that you can just throw software out there, otherwise writing software would be high liability sport only for those with deep pockets or nothing to lose.
Low earth orbit (LEO) is not a big threat, even a major clusterfuck would be resolved in a couple decades as the debris burns up in the athmosphere. The only way ISS stays in the sky is because of constant boosts by visiting space ships. satellites similarly have built in thrusters for their design life. In GEO on the other hand the orbit is stable for centuries and fucking up bad there would plague us for a very long time.
Last time I went there I needed a 1/8" audio jack and some solder. It was great, I don't know where else I could have gotten those things in 20 minutes, but $8/year doesn't keep a store open, and the times I need those connectors are few and far between.
Yeah, a big margin on a small item doesn't help much. I remember this one time I was out of batteries for my WiiMotes and with kids that really wanted to play, found some at a nearby camping kiosk. Actually they didn't really carry it, her son just had some extra and we paid about 5x the supermarket price. My friend thought that was bizarrely expensive, I was just like it's Sunday afternoon, we got it without driving ages and it's not like she's going to get rich selling one pack of batteries. One buck for the batteries and four bucks for being there at the right time, in the right place when we needed them.
I see the same thing with retail computer stores too, they charge a bundle for a cable. But then I think, well I wouldn't go there except to buy a cable so instead of paying rent and salary off a $300 GPU sale they need to do it off a $5 cable. No wonder they need to have a big margin. And in many other cases people go "browsing" the retail store then go home and order it online. If I was to go into retail, I'd stay way out of those businesses and find something you'd want to buy on site.
Agreed. Also, I don't ever recall return on investment as being one of the selling points of BitCoin in the first place. It was meant as an alternative to currency, not an investment vehicle. Even if the value dropped to parity with the US Dollar or below, it would still retain its initial utility. So again, nothing lost.
Except that for a currency to work somebody has to be sitting on it, no matter how fast you shuffle it around. If everybody's hoarding it because the value keeps rising that's not great for circulation, but some will look to cash in their earnings and keep at least a trickle going. If the value keeps dropping there's no floor, if it drops from $1000 to $1 what makes you think it won't drop to $0.001? I suppose that eventually you'll hit some kind of die-hard fanatics who'll scoop it up against all reason like the penny stock of an impending bankruptcy, but I don't know anyone with serious money who'll sit on something that's losing value every day.
I mean if you own BitCoins today there's really three ways to think about it:
1) I'm speculating that it'll rebound eventually, I'd be a fool to sell out at the bottom
2) It'll keep dropping, so I should cash out now while they're still worth something
3) It'll magically become stable-ish so I should just keep it for when I want to buy stuff.
I mean you need pretty strong drugs to be in the third group, it's like taking the expected value of a lottery ticket. Very soon you'll either have lots of money or no money, that it's going to break even is all but impossible. And if you're going to do real world conversions all the time to avoid holding bitcoins, then you've really just invented a very annoying way to do currency trading.
4) Though it doesn't apply to people outside of the /. crowd so much, I love building/upgrading my own systems, it's fun and cheap.
I think the excitement over finally getting a faster computer used to get me on a mental high that lasted through the assembly like a kid waiting for Christmas presents, but these days I just want to get it over with and the damn thing to work. I only do it because it's the only way to get the components I want, looked it over now and still can't find a PC builder that'll give me this GTX 970 SLI setup. I could almost get the same single card setup except they didn't have the SSD I want, which means they can't install the OS and I actually kept my 16GB of RAM from 2011, obviously to get an all new PC it comes with RAM. And when I bought it the 970s weren't in the builder at all.
I really thought the last PC I built was going to be the last one I'd bother with. Now I'm thinking the same thing again. We'll see in another 5+ years when this one is starting to sag, I suspect that I once again will want something that doesn't quite fit their semi-custom models. Not that this was my most successful build either, if I had to go it again I'd pick the Fractal Define XL over the regular one, with full size graphics card those extra 4 cm of depth would have made it so much easier to work with, now the graphics cards are basically snuggling the HDD cage. Still works quite nicely though.
Also this isn't a problem in Linux because either you're usually installing from a repo or source, of which the requirement for any repo package or code base isn't going to be libtrackingmalwarelolpwn(64 bit; of course).
When Ubuntu by default will send anything you search for locally to Amazon for sponsored results there's shades of gray pretty much everywhere. All the hidden ways they try to make money off you are often more dirty than just asking you outright to pay. Like many freemium games, you make a fun game that'll turn into a slow and pointless grind unless you pay up. It's your basic bait and switch turned into a business model.
You can try 10 Technical Preview. It is Windows 8.1 with Metro condensed to a start menu. It still has some full-screen hijacking apps and tons of bloat from Bing and the "App" Store. This might be ok for some people but it sounds like Microsoft is going down the wrong road for those of us that like a clean, controlled, and predictable system. Linux may be the answer for many if it has the right program support, but it's possible that 7 is the last sane OS from Microsoft.
Windows 10 looks quite okay, I'll install Chrome (no IE), MPC-HC (no WMP), 7zip, Notepad++, XnView etc. instead of the bundled apps and be fine I think, unlike Win8 it looks like it can work mostly the same except with a tile menu as long as you stay away from the Metro apps. The important thing is that it runs all my existing Windows applications and I get security patches, I don't really care about Microsoft's agenda. I already abandoned jumped to Linux once over Vista but came back for 7, this time I'll just wait it out. I'm assuming that before EOL of Windows 7 they'll provide some kind of "traditional desktop" upgrade path for conservative businesses, particularly now that Nadella is CEO. I'm not in a hurry, Win7 works well and there's no pressing need to upgrade.
A conservative's overall goal is to preserve the status quo, they're reactionary (looking to prevent change) rather than radical (looking to provoke change) but they can be just as extreme in justifying means to an end. Fundamentalists for example are in general conservatives, they want you to keep living exactly by 1000+ year old books. For some that means living like the Amish, others use camera phones to post beheading videos on YouTube. The full scale from embracement to rejection to eradication is justified as means to an end, they can be every bit as crazy as radicals.
The fundamental concept of a warrant goes all the way back to the bill of rights and probably further, there was never an absolute right to privacy. Modern encryption is often rendering warrants meaningless, sure you can wave a piece of paper but the modern day "letter" is wrapped in a safe you couldn't blow up with dynamite and the key only exists in my head, the world has changed whether the conservatives want it to or not. What they want is to turn back time, what they end up doing is either abolishing warrants or abolishing private communications. It's not like one is significantly less conservative than the other, they're both long standing customs.
In this case wouldn't mutually assured destruction (MAD) be exactly what you're going for?
I'm serious, but you are right. In the near future, spinning disks will be used for the same applications and seen as the dinosaur of technology: backup and low-performance works. The truth of the matter is that spinning disks are simply to slow for modern day technology. Compare your laptop when using a 7200rpm disk or an SSD. Compare your Oracle database query times when using a legacy storage vendor or an all flash array that can do 1 million IOPS . It is the performance aspect that matters in modern day computing. The bottleneck is storage, not your CPU, not your memory, storage.
Except that using a computer to store your family photos is a very valid use case, it doesn't have to be about "computing". When people play Angry Birds they're battery bound, when people stream Netflix they're bandwidth bound, when people play FPS games they're GPU bound, when old people want big screens with big text they're interface bound. And I'm sure there's people doing weather simulations that'll say they're CPU/memory bound. Yes, if you measured the time the average desktop user spent waiting for IO before SSDs it was significant, but I got my first one 5+ years ago so it's getting history.
Today a modern SSD can do 10000 IOPS at QD=1 with a average response time of <0.05 ms. Or in layman's speak, near instant. For an enterprise database sure 1 million IOPS is nice, but would the average user notice the difference if you could put one in his laptop? I think not. Even in the enterprise it's getting to be a replacement for poor optimization and running bad SQL, sometimes I really feel like replacing our dev environment's disks with a single 5400 RPM HDD so maybe we'd get rid of the worst offenses. A lot of people are simply incapable of designing and querying large databases efficiently because table scans worked so well on the small stuff.
Practically I don't feel it's very significantly different anymore. Sure a little faster CPU, a little faster GPU, a little more RAM, bigger and cheaper SSDs but it's mostly the same. To feel that big a difference what you had before must have been rather crap, I still remember how adding a Gravis Ultrasound turned PC sound from shit to excellent. Or adding a new graphics card so you could have transparent, splashing water in Morrowind. Getting a floppy drive for my C64 so I didn't have to wait ages for the tape player. I hereby predict this will be the least exciting decade for storage, except the ones that follow it.
Why libinput integration in KWin?
KWin/Wayland already supported input handling by being a Wayland client and connecting to a Seat. But especially for pointer events this was not sufficient at all. We have quite some code where we warp the pointer and Wayland doesnâ(TM)t support this (and shouldn't). Warping the pointer is normally considered evil as it can introduce quite some problems if applications are allowed to warp the pointer. E.g. it can create security issues if you start typing your password and a malicious applications warps the pointer to trick you entering your password into a password field of the malicious application. Also from a usabililty perspective it can be problematic as it makes the system behave in an unpredictable way.
I think the "and shouldn't" part is wrong. The next paragraph goes on to say why a window manager/compositor needs it. And to quote a 10 year old post, here's reasons why an application might need it:
There are applications where pointer warping is beneficial. Most have to do with tracking mouse movement to move a camera in a 3-d viewing context. For instance to look around a 3d world, using the mouse to point the camera. One can just compare the pointer position to the previous position to get a vector to rotate the camera, however this will fail when the pointer reaches the edge of the screen, and no more motion in that axis will be detected. With pointer warping, one can disable the drawing of the pointer, warp it to the center of the screen and just calculate thier movement vector based on the position of the pointer from the center of the screen, and warp the pointer back to the center of the screen. One now has full freedom to rotate the camera with the mouse. This is a useful feature in 3d games, 3d modelviewing, virtual tours, and many other 3d applications.
Also useful for trapping the cursor in a VM, if you want the edges. Another application I can think of is trying to select a region from a large image that requires scrolling. Usually that involves button press and hold, moving the cursor to the edge of the image carefully avoiding moving off the image and waiting until it scrolls for you. It would be a lot more elegant if it could just restrict the pointer to the image while you're doing your hold so hitting the edge and beyond would scroll the image directly. Once you release the button (or cancel the operation, typically ESC) the pointer is freed again. Of course the downsides is that an evil application can warp it maliciously and a broken application can trap your pointer. Still, this seems something better managed by an client security profiles than bypassing it by grabbing input altogether. And the compositor may have a "failsafe" key combo to detach the pointer from a malfunctioning application.
The other use case mentioned with global shortcuts is also the same, for a test/automation framework it could be useful to launch a child application while controlling its input and output. But obviously you can also launch the browser in a password-stealing keylogger wrapper, that would be bad. So again, security profiles? This is a compositor, when I sudo apt-get install it'll ask for extra permissions. Compromise my browser/mail client? No permission to warp pointer. This just seems to break the encapsulation that Wayland is trying to provide, here's your display and here's your input. Imagine for example a multiseat setup where all the devices don't belong to you, by grabbing input directly you're circumventing that. And say Wayland does something like rotate/zoom your display, you bypass any translation the display server does. That seems rather messy.