Maybe it won't be good enough for Netflix streaming since they want to "upsell" you to their PPV service, but providing decent Internet should be no problem at all, not counting tropical islands and such but normal hotels in big cities. Heck, here at home I got 100/100 Mbit all to myself and it would easily let 100 people surf the web and check their mail as long as the hogs gets last priority. Hotels know they got you hooked on the convenience, you can get cheaper drinks at the corner store, cheaper food at a local restaurant and cheaper internet at an internet cafe but grabbing a drink from the minibar, order some room service and hook up the room wifi is so easy you'll overpay for it. Fortunately many hotels now consider it part of the basic service.
Yeah but take a look at the construction photos like this one. A modern construction crew with huge excavators and trucks would be in a whole different league.
I'm not so sure about the "influence Snowden" part. By giving him a temporary stay when he's got very few other places to go they're giving him a lot of incentive to be that useful puppet, as opposed to a permanent stay. If they did that, he might withdraw from the public spotlight or start pointing out it's the pot calling the kettle black. No doubt the Russians have similar operations of their own.
True, but humans are way more likely to ignore lights that are out, warning lights, fatigue or any other condition suggesting they should pull over. I expect autonomous cars to pull over and refuse to continue the moment they become impaired.
After watching the video, it's abundantly clear why people should be nervous about autonomous vehicles.
No, it's clear why we should be worried about almost-but-not-really autonomous vehicles, in the real deal this would be fine. If we could get this guy as far away from a steering wheel as possible, it'd be perfect.
What I liked Qt for is that before the mobile craze, Metro and all the other things happening recently was that it was a fairly simple way to create a functional UI on all the traditional desktops (Win/Mac/Linux) - all the platforms that mattered - and that looked native (where Java went horribly wrong) and did its best to follow platform conventions like button ordering and such. And it is a "standard" library that matches other modern platforms, you can get very far with only Qt. It wasn't very fancy but gave you all the windows, dialogs, menus, tool bars, status bars, buttons, checkboxes, radioboxes, lists, tree views, tables and so on and so forth. And file/network/database/i18n etc. support.
In the mobile world,. it just doesn't matter so much - every app is full screen and pretty much does their own thing. You'd rather have Angry Birds on Android look exactly like Angry Birds on iOS than following any kind of convention. If you want to do "real" graphics, it's OpenGL ES that is the Android/iOS cross platform solution. I guess not for WP, but that's more Microsoft's problem. If it'd been the primary development language for Nokia apps (pre-implosion) things might have been different, but now it just doesn't have many killer features.
Back on the desktop companies - or to be honest one company with something like 90% market share - is trying to throw away old paradigms that have been mostly the same since Windows 3.1, flame wars aside that's pretty bad news for a toolkit built on trying to make things work the same across all platforms while fitting in. And despite Qt fixing most issues, it still has inherited a lot of baggage from C/C++ that honestly could have been better. Java and C# has gone through several iterations, Swift is the result of a lot of ObjectiveC experience while C++ is changing very, very slowly by committee and a lot of bad behavior can never be unbroken.
Bluntly, this won't affect most Americans for the same reason spam from.il, ru, or.cn doesn't matter - Because we simply don't get any legitimate email from those domains. It doesn't take your spam filter long to figure out "if the address contains character-X, 100% chance of spam"... And that assumes your mail server doesn't outright block those as a hardcoded rule (in a former life I had to babysit the Exchange server for a small business; if you came from anywhere not in one of the big-six TLDs, auto-junk).
It must be wonderful to run a mom and pop operation where none of your customers, suppliers or anyone else has an international mail address. And it certainly won't work for any other country but the US, a canadian business that doesn't accept.ca mail? Don't think so. And if you're operating an ISP, university or whatever some of your users will be foreigners in real contact with the rest of the world. Neat that you can wave the WORKS4ME flag, it's still a problem for a lot of other people.
They can get binding contracts that state the goals and future of commercial software.
Who, pray tell, are those? Anything I've seen of forward looking statements come with at least a full page of legalese saying that anything you see here of roadmaps, features, demos and whatnot may be the lucid ravings of a madman that may or may not be implemented at some undetermined point in the future regardless of any other statements about what, how or when they "think" or "plan" or "intend" to do anything. You can get guarantees of non-specific support and/or development for X years but in practice those promises are so hollow they can outsource it to the lowest bidder on a skeleton crew and still claim to be complying with the letter, if not the spirit of the contract.
Going very much off topic here but what I miss from Mozilla is a real open source and decentralized/self-hosted/third party hosted alternative to Facebook/iCloud/Google+ accounts, something like Diaspora and OwnCloud only better. It wouldn't let you mine data like the centralized solutions, but it'd be a very good continuation of their mission.
If we're going with medical analogies I'd say CEO make a prayer and take credit if the patient recovers and throw up their hands and say I did all I could if it fails.
This exact story could have been posted the first day I visited/. and nothing has changed nor will it change. Keeping the documentation up to date with good examples is boring work and few want to do it. A lot of open source developers do it for their own benefit and will simply say that's not their problem. Since most of it is a volunteer effort you can't make them do anything and the few who want to write documentation can't make a dent in the number of changes that should have been documented.
There are of course exceptions but they usually intersect with the kind of software that runs business critical applications where a lot of time and money is riding on it and paid developers do a lot of the work. Or you have someone who's being a bit of a nazi on it, but they tend to often get overrun by a fork that's moving more quick and dirty. Because users like to complain about poor documentation but they want the shiny new features too and there's not a few forks that's started because someone was rightly denied commit privileges.
Personally I got tired of waiting for the gold at the end of the rainbow when things would finally stabilize and get working and documented and done. It is a half-baked work in progress and if you got the time and interest to deal with it please do. I managed to make Linux work for me for about 3.5 years, thinking I'd eventually get to stop tinkering with it but despite releases coming and going fixing some issues new ones appeared and it never really settled down. I finally decided to get a Win7 license four years ago, I guess Linux is an escape option if Microsoft doesn't clue in from Win8/8.1 but I don't expect much has changed.
P.S. That's something I heard often, you tried like a 12 month old distro? Try it now, all your criticism is outdated and it's totally different and much better now. I used it long enough to know that's usually total BS.
Someone at Google blew the whistle? If 'someone at Google' was able to look inside, how do we know they didn't put it inside in the first place? If you rent an apartment and your landlord has the master key, the police are going to have a VERY hard time convincing the court that you are the guilty party when the only reason they investigated you in the first place was because your landlord tipped off the police.
Hahahaha are you and the people who modded you up serious? The old "It must be the landlord / tenant / colleague / employer / computer repairman / burglar / (ex-)wife who 'found' it that planted it." is a very long shot at best. Unless they really screwed up the frame job so it's obviously not you the police, prosecutor and jury will have already decided you're guilty and trying to find ways to crusify you. No way they're going to let you walk on a technicality or the explanation that the dog ate your homework. You're trying to find reasonable doubt in a situation where everybody expects you to lie, that you claim to have been framed has exactly zero weight in court. You'd better hope there's evidence to save you.
Birthday attack. For 128 bits of hash, a trillion files (10^12) the probability of two files randomly matching is less than 10^-12 = 0.000000000001. If there's collision attacks you can create a false flag using a specially crafted file, but I assume either Google or the police will verify what it really is before proceeding. If you wanted someone framed that badly, I imagine It'd be easier to find a real image and send it to their gmail address. Make the sender, subject and body look like spam so they won't open the file and you could probably ruin somebody's life quite thoroughly.
If you were watching it you'd probably feel you were in slow-mo. Ever tried to ride an elephant? It's sloooooooow and even though they might stampede over a very short distance it's quickly over and back to a trot. Despite the huge size most estimates of T. Rex's speed suggests a human sprinter could outrun it, it only needed to catch even slower dinosaurs. If you want action I'd take a leopard and a gazelle instead.
The ideal setup will be turnkey with little-to-no maintenance and if possible support auto-answering calls from approved users.
OP says no maintenance at the Alzheimers home, my suggestion needs no intervention on the Alzheimer homes part once it's up and running. If OP wants something that requires absolutely no setup, no software, no hardware and magic internet rainbows, then he is shit out of luck. But that's not how I read the request.
Well first of all he asked for a turnkey solution, which is pretty much the opposite of a DIY project. If someone took a small fanless box, cobbled together these open source projects, configured them and created a nice little administration UI and manual/troubleshooting instructions for sale you'd be pretty close to a turnkey solution but this would basically be his custom client-server setup that only an expert could maintain. Which brings us to the second point, he asked for little-to-no maintenance full stop. Adding a server and hosting hardly sounds like low maintenance, it adds complexity to what seems like a very basic direct videophone call. Surely one of those has the basic contact management to handle this? This seems mostly like a lazy man's "I'll let/. Google it for me instead of doing my own research" question.
That's the only think I can think of to fully explain Windows 8, and why even now they're refusing to admit that Metro apps are a steaming turd on top of an otherwise competent OS. The only idiots who like using those "apps" are the ones who would probably be better off with a tablet or smartphone instead of an actual desktop computer, for whom the actual power of a desktop is apparently wasted.
They can afford to because they're not actually bleeding users, people either run new versions of Windows or old versions of Windows. Until there's any indication users are leaving for non-Windows platforms they're not really at any risk of losing them as customers, the convenience of continuing running Windows software is too great. Practically everybody who was lambasting Vista jumped on 7, we'd just as easily forget 8 ever happened too.
I'm not sure how exactly Microsoft could do anything about Android/iOS at this point, but I'm not surprised they're trying desperately. Long term I think it's very likely it will all be just one computing platform with different user interfaces. Metro is their best shot at being that winner, if they just sit back sooner rather than later the tablets "extend" to have a keyboard, mouse and a size boost and you have a laptop attacking the core markets of Microsoft.
Not to mention "perfect information" as used in theory basically means "everything communicated via instant telepathy", in practice nobody has the time for that. At best you sample just a little bit and hope it's representative for the rest.
What are you trying to do, create a buzzword black hole that'll consume civilization as we know it and leave nothing but a post-apocalyptic landscape of marketdroids and PHBs?
Well, from Norway the total figures for land transport of goods and people is 4,6% of the employment, though that may include related service like loading and unloading. However, there's also work in the primary industries (agriculture, forestry, mining) and many operating trucks and such in production industries that are also potential targets for automation. The biggest productivity boost is that people could use the time they spend driving for other things though. Limiting myself to personal cars (not taxis, buses, delivery vans, trucks etc.) the average driver's licence holder drives 18812 km/year. I'm not sure if there's some professional use of personal cars in there. But it's certainly hundreds of hours per year per year, just my short commute is 15 mins*2*200 days/year = 100 hours plus everything else in evenings, weekends, vacations and so on.
What's there to fix? There are at least two critical issues that no computer software can fix.
1. Confidentiality, it's impossible to prove there's no shadow system recording who voted for what. In paper elections I pick my ballot and fold it so nobody can see what I vote for, the election officials register my vote as used and stamp it and then I put it in the ballot box. It's practically impossible to track which paper slip is mine beyond that point so barring hidden cameras in the booth my anonymity is now secure. With postal votes the votes go in a sealed envelope wrapped in another envelope with the voter card, they open the outer envelope and register the vote and put the sealed votes in a ballot box. Nobody is supposed to see your individual, identified vote. Of course anyone who gets hold of it can tear up both envelopes to see what you voted for, but there's one-time seals and stamps to prevent it happening covertly so it's very hard to do in scale.
With e-voting, you really just have to trust the system that it won't keep a secret record of the votes somewhere. You can wrap it in as much techno-babble as you want but if you just keep all the information and don't throw any away you can map voters to votes. Open source is no magic bullet that makes sure there's no root kit or secret backdoor or screen grabber or snooping hypervisor or system sniffing the network traffic using the voting machine's private keys. With paper voting you can pretty much prove that information goes away through the ballot box process, with e-voting you simply can't. You really think the NSA can't rig an e-voting machine so it records your vote and nobody would detect it? Then I've got a bridge to sell you.
2. Integrity, since you can't prove a particular vote was cast a particular way - and for good reason - the whole system relies on the integrity of the ballot box. The initial state (empty), the inputs (votes being put in) and output (emptied and counted) is closely guarded to see no funny business is happening. You can't guard a memory location, nor could you guarantee the votes in transit. If you got 50 people voting Democrat and 50 voting Republican nobody will realize if the vote came out 51-49 because someone decided to flip a bit or adjust a counter. You can make all sorts of theoretical proofs that the value won't change but they all rely on the assumption that the system won't be tampered with. Which is a pretty bad idea, when you're trying to assess how hard it'd be to tamper with it.
All you need to do is have some sort of switch to make sure it only does that during real elections and not testing. And it doesn't have to be a huge number of votes to matter, if you did that people would start to question why there's such a difference between the polls and elections anyway. Being able to throw swing votes is huge particularly in first past the post systems like the US, for example you could easily have swung the Bush/Gore race in Florida. Here in Europe the limit for representation in parliament is huge, in my country 4,01% and 3,99% is a world of difference and being able to knock one out could totally shift the balance of power between the blocks. Voting fraud doesn't have to be a third world problem with cheesy dictators and despots, there's plenty money and power involved to make it plausible in free and democratic countries too.
That depends on what you mean by a "free" market, which is even more complicated than the "free as in speech or free as in beer" of software. One meaning is as the opposite to a controlled market - one where participants and/or prices are regulated and you don't have a natural supply and demand. Obviously the car industry doesn't have that (but it did in the past, like the development of the Volkswagen in Germany), so in that sense it's free.
A second idea of a free market is a functional, competitive market where there are realistic choices and practically possibilities for new entrants to enter the market. The first definition doesn't exclude monopolies, oligarchies, collusion and cartels, dumping, price discrimination, exclusivity deals, IPR (imaginary property rights) lockout or any other number of anti-competitive behaviors.
A third idea of a free market is being as close as possible to perfect competition, a mostly unreachable ideal where you have cutthroat competition that'll constantly underbid each other until they sell at marginal cost and no profit is made. Lowering barriers to entry might be one way of trying to "lube" the market into functioning smoother, or you could for example require stores to show prices per kilo/liter to improve price transparency.
A "pseudo-autonomous" car will probably never fail the basic operations on a road with regular markings and road signs, do everything by the book and pay full attention all around it all the time and it'll never panic, fumble or road rage. I think it will very quickly lull you into a false security where you're wondering why exactly you're babysitting this car because it's driving far more consistent and correct than you would.
The problem is when something unexpected happens and the car fails to recognize it or do something reasonable - that's a very fuzzy definition but everybody who's programmed computer software knows what I mean, no matter how many sanity checks and errors and exceptions you catch something unexpected happens and the software tends to fail spectacularly. I expect that at this point the "driver" will be totally blindsided and useless.
Fast RAM is mainly important for graphics. AMD has a more powerful IGP, the Intel equivalent performs worse and so requires less. That is why Intel went with embedded DRAM on their best IGPs (brand name "Intel Iris Pro Graphics 5200"), though none of these are retail chips but only for laptops and AIOs. Personally I'm of the opinion that either you don't care about the GPU at all and it doesn't matter, or you should care enough to get a decent graphics card. Putting a CPU+GPU on a 65W power budget won't ever be great unless you want to play Dota 2.
And yet in nearly 7 decades of MAD, no one has ever done so.
The Romans managed 206 years in their "pax romana", it's not exactly proof MAD is working or everlasting. What we do know is that there's an awfully big boom when it doesn't work.
What's the alternative, trust that others will actually do what they say and remove all nuclear capability? Every country would see that as a golden opportunity to keep some hidden by hook, nook, or crook, so that then they're the only ones in the world with nukes.. win!
Enough to win if everyone else sees it as a madman's weapon that should be neutralized before they go all Hitler on us? Because when you pop outside that little bubble called global thermonuclear war everyone else who talked about killing hundreds of millions of civilians would be considered a genocidal lunatic. Could a rouge nuclear nation be stopped conventionally? How quickly could a global alliance against you gain nukes again? Will nukes get through rocket shields? How sure are they nobody else also kept some?
Don't forget that the "nuclear club" has a pretty solid double standard where they perfectly legitimize having their own nukes and last I checked the official NATO and Russian policy is that they can respond to any attack, conventional or nuclear with nuclear force while they strongly work for non-proliferation to prevent others from having the same weapons at their disposal. They trust it so much they very strongly don't want anyone else to join the "MAD club", why do you think that is? Because they know the whole thing is fickle as hell and someone might end up pushing the button.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe it won't be good enough for Netflix streaming since they want to "upsell" you to their PPV service, but providing decent Internet should be no problem at all, not counting tropical islands and such but normal hotels in big cities. Heck, here at home I got 100/100 Mbit all to myself and it would easily let 100 people surf the web and check their mail as long as the hogs gets last priority. Hotels know they got you hooked on the convenience, you can get cheaper drinks at the corner store, cheaper food at a local restaurant and cheaper internet at an internet cafe but grabbing a drink from the minibar, order some room service and hook up the room wifi is so easy you'll overpay for it. Fortunately many hotels now consider it part of the basic service.
Yeah but take a look at the construction photos like this one. A modern construction crew with huge excavators and trucks would be in a whole different league.
I'm not so sure about the "influence Snowden" part. By giving him a temporary stay when he's got very few other places to go they're giving him a lot of incentive to be that useful puppet, as opposed to a permanent stay. If they did that, he might withdraw from the public spotlight or start pointing out it's the pot calling the kettle black. No doubt the Russians have similar operations of their own.
True, but humans are way more likely to ignore lights that are out, warning lights, fatigue or any other condition suggesting they should pull over. I expect autonomous cars to pull over and refuse to continue the moment they become impaired.
After watching the video, it's abundantly clear why people should be nervous about autonomous vehicles.
No, it's clear why we should be worried about almost-but-not-really autonomous vehicles, in the real deal this would be fine. If we could get this guy as far away from a steering wheel as possible, it'd be perfect.
What I liked Qt for is that before the mobile craze, Metro and all the other things happening recently was that it was a fairly simple way to create a functional UI on all the traditional desktops (Win/Mac/Linux) - all the platforms that mattered - and that looked native (where Java went horribly wrong) and did its best to follow platform conventions like button ordering and such. And it is a "standard" library that matches other modern platforms, you can get very far with only Qt. It wasn't very fancy but gave you all the windows, dialogs, menus, tool bars, status bars, buttons, checkboxes, radioboxes, lists, tree views, tables and so on and so forth. And file/network/database/i18n etc. support.
In the mobile world,. it just doesn't matter so much - every app is full screen and pretty much does their own thing. You'd rather have Angry Birds on Android look exactly like Angry Birds on iOS than following any kind of convention. If you want to do "real" graphics, it's OpenGL ES that is the Android/iOS cross platform solution. I guess not for WP, but that's more Microsoft's problem. If it'd been the primary development language for Nokia apps (pre-implosion) things might have been different, but now it just doesn't have many killer features.
Back on the desktop companies - or to be honest one company with something like 90% market share - is trying to throw away old paradigms that have been mostly the same since Windows 3.1, flame wars aside that's pretty bad news for a toolkit built on trying to make things work the same across all platforms while fitting in. And despite Qt fixing most issues, it still has inherited a lot of baggage from C/C++ that honestly could have been better. Java and C# has gone through several iterations, Swift is the result of a lot of ObjectiveC experience while C++ is changing very, very slowly by committee and a lot of bad behavior can never be unbroken.
Bluntly, this won't affect most Americans for the same reason spam from .il, ru, or .cn doesn't matter - Because we simply don't get any legitimate email from those domains. It doesn't take your spam filter long to figure out "if the address contains character-X, 100% chance of spam"... And that assumes your mail server doesn't outright block those as a hardcoded rule (in a former life I had to babysit the Exchange server for a small business; if you came from anywhere not in one of the big-six TLDs, auto-junk).
It must be wonderful to run a mom and pop operation where none of your customers, suppliers or anyone else has an international mail address. And it certainly won't work for any other country but the US, a canadian business that doesn't accept .ca mail? Don't think so. And if you're operating an ISP, university or whatever some of your users will be foreigners in real contact with the rest of the world. Neat that you can wave the WORKS4ME flag, it's still a problem for a lot of other people.
They can get binding contracts that state the goals and future of commercial software.
Who, pray tell, are those? Anything I've seen of forward looking statements come with at least a full page of legalese saying that anything you see here of roadmaps, features, demos and whatnot may be the lucid ravings of a madman that may or may not be implemented at some undetermined point in the future regardless of any other statements about what, how or when they "think" or "plan" or "intend" to do anything. You can get guarantees of non-specific support and/or development for X years but in practice those promises are so hollow they can outsource it to the lowest bidder on a skeleton crew and still claim to be complying with the letter, if not the spirit of the contract.
Going very much off topic here but what I miss from Mozilla is a real open source and decentralized/self-hosted/third party hosted alternative to Facebook/iCloud/Google+ accounts, something like Diaspora and OwnCloud only better. It wouldn't let you mine data like the centralized solutions, but it'd be a very good continuation of their mission.
If we're going with medical analogies I'd say CEO make a prayer and take credit if the patient recovers and throw up their hands and say I did all I could if it fails.
This exact story could have been posted the first day I visited /. and nothing has changed nor will it change. Keeping the documentation up to date with good examples is boring work and few want to do it. A lot of open source developers do it for their own benefit and will simply say that's not their problem. Since most of it is a volunteer effort you can't make them do anything and the few who want to write documentation can't make a dent in the number of changes that should have been documented.
There are of course exceptions but they usually intersect with the kind of software that runs business critical applications where a lot of time and money is riding on it and paid developers do a lot of the work. Or you have someone who's being a bit of a nazi on it, but they tend to often get overrun by a fork that's moving more quick and dirty. Because users like to complain about poor documentation but they want the shiny new features too and there's not a few forks that's started because someone was rightly denied commit privileges.
Personally I got tired of waiting for the gold at the end of the rainbow when things would finally stabilize and get working and documented and done. It is a half-baked work in progress and if you got the time and interest to deal with it please do. I managed to make Linux work for me for about 3.5 years, thinking I'd eventually get to stop tinkering with it but despite releases coming and going fixing some issues new ones appeared and it never really settled down. I finally decided to get a Win7 license four years ago, I guess Linux is an escape option if Microsoft doesn't clue in from Win8/8.1 but I don't expect much has changed.
P.S. That's something I heard often, you tried like a 12 month old distro? Try it now, all your criticism is outdated and it's totally different and much better now. I used it long enough to know that's usually total BS.
Someone at Google blew the whistle? If 'someone at Google' was able to look inside, how do we know they didn't put it inside in the first place? If you rent an apartment and your landlord has the master key, the police are going to have a VERY hard time convincing the court that you are the guilty party when the only reason they investigated you in the first place was because your landlord tipped off the police.
Hahahaha are you and the people who modded you up serious? The old "It must be the landlord / tenant / colleague / employer / computer repairman / burglar / (ex-)wife who 'found' it that planted it." is a very long shot at best. Unless they really screwed up the frame job so it's obviously not you the police, prosecutor and jury will have already decided you're guilty and trying to find ways to crusify you. No way they're going to let you walk on a technicality or the explanation that the dog ate your homework. You're trying to find reasonable doubt in a situation where everybody expects you to lie, that you claim to have been framed has exactly zero weight in court. You'd better hope there's evidence to save you.
Birthday attack. For 128 bits of hash, a trillion files (10^12) the probability of two files randomly matching is less than 10^-12 = 0.000000000001. If there's collision attacks you can create a false flag using a specially crafted file, but I assume either Google or the police will verify what it really is before proceeding. If you wanted someone framed that badly, I imagine It'd be easier to find a real image and send it to their gmail address. Make the sender, subject and body look like spam so they won't open the file and you could probably ruin somebody's life quite thoroughly.
If you were watching it you'd probably feel you were in slow-mo. Ever tried to ride an elephant? It's sloooooooow and even though they might stampede over a very short distance it's quickly over and back to a trot. Despite the huge size most estimates of T. Rex's speed suggests a human sprinter could outrun it, it only needed to catch even slower dinosaurs. If you want action I'd take a leopard and a gazelle instead.
The ideal setup will be turnkey with little-to-no maintenance and if possible support auto-answering calls from approved users.
OP says no maintenance at the Alzheimers home, my suggestion needs no intervention on the Alzheimer homes part once it's up and running. If OP wants something that requires absolutely no setup, no software, no hardware and magic internet rainbows, then he is shit out of luck. But that's not how I read the request.
Well first of all he asked for a turnkey solution, which is pretty much the opposite of a DIY project. If someone took a small fanless box, cobbled together these open source projects, configured them and created a nice little administration UI and manual/troubleshooting instructions for sale you'd be pretty close to a turnkey solution but this would basically be his custom client-server setup that only an expert could maintain. Which brings us to the second point, he asked for little-to-no maintenance full stop. Adding a server and hosting hardly sounds like low maintenance, it adds complexity to what seems like a very basic direct videophone call. Surely one of those has the basic contact management to handle this? This seems mostly like a lazy man's "I'll let /. Google it for me instead of doing my own research" question.
That's the only think I can think of to fully explain Windows 8, and why even now they're refusing to admit that Metro apps are a steaming turd on top of an otherwise competent OS. The only idiots who like using those "apps" are the ones who would probably be better off with a tablet or smartphone instead of an actual desktop computer, for whom the actual power of a desktop is apparently wasted.
They can afford to because they're not actually bleeding users, people either run new versions of Windows or old versions of Windows. Until there's any indication users are leaving for non-Windows platforms they're not really at any risk of losing them as customers, the convenience of continuing running Windows software is too great. Practically everybody who was lambasting Vista jumped on 7, we'd just as easily forget 8 ever happened too.
I'm not sure how exactly Microsoft could do anything about Android/iOS at this point, but I'm not surprised they're trying desperately. Long term I think it's very likely it will all be just one computing platform with different user interfaces. Metro is their best shot at being that winner, if they just sit back sooner rather than later the tablets "extend" to have a keyboard, mouse and a size boost and you have a laptop attacking the core markets of Microsoft.
Not to mention "perfect information" as used in theory basically means "everything communicated via instant telepathy", in practice nobody has the time for that. At best you sample just a little bit and hope it's representative for the rest.
What are you trying to do, create a buzzword black hole that'll consume civilization as we know it and leave nothing but a post-apocalyptic landscape of marketdroids and PHBs?
Well, from Norway the total figures for land transport of goods and people is 4,6% of the employment, though that may include related service like loading and unloading. However, there's also work in the primary industries (agriculture, forestry, mining) and many operating trucks and such in production industries that are also potential targets for automation. The biggest productivity boost is that people could use the time they spend driving for other things though. Limiting myself to personal cars (not taxis, buses, delivery vans, trucks etc.) the average driver's licence holder drives 18812 km/year. I'm not sure if there's some professional use of personal cars in there. But it's certainly hundreds of hours per year per year, just my short commute is 15 mins*2*200 days/year = 100 hours plus everything else in evenings, weekends, vacations and so on.
What's there to fix? There are at least two critical issues that no computer software can fix.
1. Confidentiality, it's impossible to prove there's no shadow system recording who voted for what. In paper elections I pick my ballot and fold it so nobody can see what I vote for, the election officials register my vote as used and stamp it and then I put it in the ballot box. It's practically impossible to track which paper slip is mine beyond that point so barring hidden cameras in the booth my anonymity is now secure. With postal votes the votes go in a sealed envelope wrapped in another envelope with the voter card, they open the outer envelope and register the vote and put the sealed votes in a ballot box. Nobody is supposed to see your individual, identified vote. Of course anyone who gets hold of it can tear up both envelopes to see what you voted for, but there's one-time seals and stamps to prevent it happening covertly so it's very hard to do in scale.
With e-voting, you really just have to trust the system that it won't keep a secret record of the votes somewhere. You can wrap it in as much techno-babble as you want but if you just keep all the information and don't throw any away you can map voters to votes. Open source is no magic bullet that makes sure there's no root kit or secret backdoor or screen grabber or snooping hypervisor or system sniffing the network traffic using the voting machine's private keys. With paper voting you can pretty much prove that information goes away through the ballot box process, with e-voting you simply can't. You really think the NSA can't rig an e-voting machine so it records your vote and nobody would detect it? Then I've got a bridge to sell you.
2. Integrity, since you can't prove a particular vote was cast a particular way - and for good reason - the whole system relies on the integrity of the ballot box. The initial state (empty), the inputs (votes being put in) and output (emptied and counted) is closely guarded to see no funny business is happening. You can't guard a memory location, nor could you guarantee the votes in transit. If you got 50 people voting Democrat and 50 voting Republican nobody will realize if the vote came out 51-49 because someone decided to flip a bit or adjust a counter. You can make all sorts of theoretical proofs that the value won't change but they all rely on the assumption that the system won't be tampered with. Which is a pretty bad idea, when you're trying to assess how hard it'd be to tamper with it.
All you need to do is have some sort of switch to make sure it only does that during real elections and not testing. And it doesn't have to be a huge number of votes to matter, if you did that people would start to question why there's such a difference between the polls and elections anyway. Being able to throw swing votes is huge particularly in first past the post systems like the US, for example you could easily have swung the Bush/Gore race in Florida. Here in Europe the limit for representation in parliament is huge, in my country 4,01% and 3,99% is a world of difference and being able to knock one out could totally shift the balance of power between the blocks. Voting fraud doesn't have to be a third world problem with cheesy dictators and despots, there's plenty money and power involved to make it plausible in free and democratic countries too.
That depends on what you mean by a "free" market, which is even more complicated than the "free as in speech or free as in beer" of software. One meaning is as the opposite to a controlled market - one where participants and/or prices are regulated and you don't have a natural supply and demand. Obviously the car industry doesn't have that (but it did in the past, like the development of the Volkswagen in Germany), so in that sense it's free.
A second idea of a free market is a functional, competitive market where there are realistic choices and practically possibilities for new entrants to enter the market. The first definition doesn't exclude monopolies, oligarchies, collusion and cartels, dumping, price discrimination, exclusivity deals, IPR (imaginary property rights) lockout or any other number of anti-competitive behaviors.
A third idea of a free market is being as close as possible to perfect competition, a mostly unreachable ideal where you have cutthroat competition that'll constantly underbid each other until they sell at marginal cost and no profit is made. Lowering barriers to entry might be one way of trying to "lube" the market into functioning smoother, or you could for example require stores to show prices per kilo/liter to improve price transparency.
A "pseudo-autonomous" car will probably never fail the basic operations on a road with regular markings and road signs, do everything by the book and pay full attention all around it all the time and it'll never panic, fumble or road rage. I think it will very quickly lull you into a false security where you're wondering why exactly you're babysitting this car because it's driving far more consistent and correct than you would.
The problem is when something unexpected happens and the car fails to recognize it or do something reasonable - that's a very fuzzy definition but everybody who's programmed computer software knows what I mean, no matter how many sanity checks and errors and exceptions you catch something unexpected happens and the software tends to fail spectacularly. I expect that at this point the "driver" will be totally blindsided and useless.
Sensors can be deliberately fooled with inanimate objects. Film at 11.
FTFY
Fast RAM is mainly important for graphics. AMD has a more powerful IGP, the Intel equivalent performs worse and so requires less. That is why Intel went with embedded DRAM on their best IGPs (brand name "Intel Iris Pro Graphics 5200"), though none of these are retail chips but only for laptops and AIOs. Personally I'm of the opinion that either you don't care about the GPU at all and it doesn't matter, or you should care enough to get a decent graphics card. Putting a CPU+GPU on a 65W power budget won't ever be great unless you want to play Dota 2.
And yet in nearly 7 decades of MAD, no one has ever done so.
The Romans managed 206 years in their "pax romana", it's not exactly proof MAD is working or everlasting. What we do know is that there's an awfully big boom when it doesn't work.
What's the alternative, trust that others will actually do what they say and remove all nuclear capability? Every country would see that as a golden opportunity to keep some hidden by hook, nook, or crook, so that then they're the only ones in the world with nukes.. win!
Enough to win if everyone else sees it as a madman's weapon that should be neutralized before they go all Hitler on us? Because when you pop outside that little bubble called global thermonuclear war everyone else who talked about killing hundreds of millions of civilians would be considered a genocidal lunatic. Could a rouge nuclear nation be stopped conventionally? How quickly could a global alliance against you gain nukes again? Will nukes get through rocket shields? How sure are they nobody else also kept some?
Don't forget that the "nuclear club" has a pretty solid double standard where they perfectly legitimize having their own nukes and last I checked the official NATO and Russian policy is that they can respond to any attack, conventional or nuclear with nuclear force while they strongly work for non-proliferation to prevent others from having the same weapons at their disposal. They trust it so much they very strongly don't want anyone else to join the "MAD club", why do you think that is? Because they know the whole thing is fickle as hell and someone might end up pushing the button.