The NSA's "kill switch" is to take a NSL to your carrier and tell them to kill your service or the whole tower or region for that matter. And if you're really bringing out the big guns there's jammers and missiles, those towers light up like beacons. And whatever exploits they have for the carrier's systems. Besides, I suppose in some WWIII-prelude knocking out the enemy's communications systems and throwing them into disarray may be useful, but I imagine 99.99% of the time they're interested in signals intelligence. Temporarily stopping me from making phone calls until I get on the Internet via fiber/cable/DSL and Skype doesn't seem like a significant objective. Turning the $500 phone that pickpocket or mugger ran off with into a brick on the other hand would have a quite significant effect on petty crime. Unless you observed my PIN and stole the card or force me to withdraw money at gun/knife point the smartphone is clearly the most valuable thing I carry around daily.
I don't think that was a money thing, rather it was an oversight of risk management. (...) Besides, where does this "blame the victim" attitude always come from?
Because it's pretty hard to criticize/discuss/improve someone's risk management without at the same time assigning part of the blame to them. I mean if I was entirely without fault that means I did nothing wrong which means I don't have to change my ways, yet here you are arguing I should take greater precautions which means I did do something stupid which means it's partly my own fault right? It's pretty hard to say that you could and should avoid danger, yet it doesn't matter if you sought and exposed yourself to danger instead.
If we forget all about rapists and imagine I was struck by lightning, you'd probably say it was a freak accident. If you heard I went to the highest vantage point nearby with my kite during a thunderstorm, you'd probably call me pretty damn stupid and say I did a great job of bringing lightning down on myself. Are you really not going to ridicule me if I fall for a 419 scam with a Nigerian prince? That one involves being exploited by another person too, are you sure you won't put any responsibility on my shoulders?
I know I'd blame myself if I left my laptop visible in the car and it got broken into, not because it broken into as such - that happens - but because I made it so much more likely it was my car getting broken into. It doesn't mean I deserved it, it's still 100% the thief's fault for stealing it but somehow my inner statistician is screaming something about conditional probability. And I don't choose the risk factors, the thief decides that a visible laptop makes it interesting. The rapists decide if mini skirts is a risk factor, not the potential victims.
No, it's not just but it's about not becoming the victim in an unjust world. And even if the perpetrator is caught and punished so justice is served it doesn't restore my health or life or trauma that another person is now in prison. I don't want any shit like that to happen to me nor anyone I care about, so I don't think I can help sending out mixed messages saying both "it's not your fault" yet "try harder not to become a victim". If you got a means that doesn't rub anyone the wrong way, I'd love to hear it.
I got a UHD @ 60Hz single stream transport here in the Samsung U28D590D. There's not much video content yet except for a few porn sites, but for stills it's brilliant. Software support for increasing font size is mediocre in many apps, but they're usually functional just ugly. I wish there was some way to just tell Windows to draw a window at 200% size instead. Gaming is cool though my graphics card is choking on the resolution when it gets heavy, I guess it needs an upgrade now that it's pushing 4x the pixels. Overall I'm happy, yes I'm an early adopter but the bleeding edge is more like a paper cut.
It sickens me, that the truth can be deleted by editors with agendas. I've seen the history re-written due to lack of publications of news and tv reportings that are from the early 80's and older. But we can have entire animated tv show episodes articles with great detail, as thats the level of knowledge as historically important.
It's not there because it is important, the trivia is there because it's not in dispute and backed up by third party references. Isn't plain facts regardless of seriousness the perfect kind of information to put on Wikipedia? It's far more structured and cohesive than using Google, it rarely shows up unless it's what you're looking for and it's not like the encyclopedia is going to run out of pages or balloon the printing costs. And most importantly, it wouldn't help. Nobody who wants to write about Pokemon characters or GoT plot summaries is going to get into an edit war with paid shills on serious topics, they'd just be over at some fan site instead.
bullshit, most the dramatic increase in human life and health of the last 500 years has been driven by and is the result of profit-seeking.
Lords were seeking to extract the greatest possible profit from their serfs too, that is not new. Most all improvements to the life of the common man has been hard fought for at the expense of the rich and powerful. True, it has been quite successful at advancing science and technology but the world would not have stood still on curiosity, ingenuity and altruism either. And lately the trickle down effect that created the middle class has slowed considerably and the rich are again pulling away from the rest, where Marx saw machines and factories it's now software and data centers that generate billions while the jobs are outsourced to the cheapest corners of the earth.
Isn't unicode already variable-length integer-ish via the UTF-8 standard? Surely we could implement a version which accommodate an effectively infinite number of character sets.
Before they gimped it to match UTF-16 it had ~2^31 combinations, now it has ~2^16. And you could have extended UTF-8 to a full ~2^42 by just continuing the scheme to fill the entire first byte, so space is really of little concern. They probably just don't want to coordinate a million different people who want to add a smiley or their imaginary fantasy language to the standard.
Or simply the ambiguity of the language. If I can get water from my own well I'd probably say I have "free water" even if I once paid someone $300 to dig the well because the marginal cost of another bucket is zero. If there was one or several bids or I did it with $300 worth of my own labor, doesn't really matter. I don't really see a problem with Google saying a $300 one-time fee for "free Internet" service forever after. Certainly if you've already sunk the cost and is selling the house, then it's perfectly legitimate to promote it as free Internet service for the buyer.
Re:The new Firaxis title was surprisingly good....
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OpenXcom 1.0 Released
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Also, the recent fireaxis xcom is nothing like the original. I like it, but again, it's more action oriented and less strategy. Unless you tell me that strategy is having a super soldier unable to carry more than one grenade per mission...
You know, in reality we'd probably have a bit more than half a dozen soldiers to fight off an alien invasion. UFO Defense was a lot more about tedium and logistics than actual strategy, okay the soldiers need bullets for their guns but I need to restock them between each mission or they'll forget to bring ammo? That's not the kind of micromanagement I'd like to be doing between researching alien tech, building new and unique equipment and facilities while staving off an alien invasion. I consider the chances in the new X-Com basically to say that for any reasonable engagement, the soldiers will have bullets because practically they'll either kill the enemy or be killed before they run out. The reload time also makes you cut down on the spray-and-pray tactics. Standard issue is maybe 2-3 grenades, I agree it's an oversimplification but it also means you get to pick the pros and cons not just throw whichever grenade is best all the time.
The solution to getting in shape is fairly simple. As long as you're in a caloric deficit, get enough protein (~1g/lb of lean body mass), and engage your muscles (I prefer to lift + rock climb + row), then you will shed the fat.
I've been up and down a lot of kilos and quite frankly the more overweight you are, the harder it is to lose weight. While keeping your weight is all about diet, losing weight through under-nourishing yourself is extremely frustrating and slow, with the body constantly nagging you with hunger and being fatigued from lack of the nutrients it can't get from fat. So that's the supply side, on the consumption side it's not much better. When my BMI was closing on 40 my endurance was next to nothing, I'd be exhausted and get pains from wobbling around long before I could burn any significant amount of calories.
Of course I had to stop the overeating that brought me there in the first place, but to go beyond that and get a real deficit going so I could lose weight working out was essential. When you don't work out the body is storing it as fat as quickly as possible to make you hungry again, but when you exercise regularly the body seems to keep more energy around in stand-by. That makes a huge difference in reducing your calorie intake without any herculean feat of will power. Plus carrying that weight becomes so much easier with a little muscle, it won't make you slim but it will make life much easier all the same.
The number of medical problems that actually cause obesity is very, very small. The primary cause in 99.99% of cases is a higher intake of calories than output of calories as activity.
Well, unless you count psychological problems as medical problems like for example depression/bipolar causing binge eating and such. For most it's simply a problem of diet and exercise, but for it's a side effect of a more serious underlying condition.
You're probably not in violation of any law unless there's some bat shit crazy laws about conspiracy to commit tax fraud. Your friend though might be in trouble, depending on how often he provides a "taxi" service to other people. In our tax system the condition (translated) is:
"A sustained activity which is likely to provide net income and operated by the taxpayer at its own expense and risk."
The key points here is a) Sustained, one-offs or highly irregular activities don't count b) Provide net income, activities that are mostly a loss are generally not deductible c) You're not in an employment relationship, you make your own business
This has been applied broadly, if you're a prostitute and make a living from it you're committing tax fraud by not reporting it. Professional poker players have been hit with back taxes. You might say it's crude and after-the-fact but if you lose money it's a hobby, if you make money it's a business. Just like Al Capone they don't need to prove you did anything illegal, only that you failed to pay your income taxes.
A nontrivial percentage of even non-Google apps also build against Google-specific APIs, rather than the relatively impoverished Android ones (the rule of thumb seems to be that, once a role is added to GPS, the AOSP implementation more or less freezes at whatever state it was in and remains there), so incompatibility, even with the absolute freshest AOSP, is quite common.
Or the TL;DR version: Embrace, extend, extinguish. Companies are not your friends, they're temporary allies as the underdog seeks to become top dog but will abandon you when they no longer need your support. They make more money that way.
I doubt it. Missing recordings cannot be recovered from. DRM can be cracked, generally trivially.
Which is why more and more of the essential code goes to live on their servers, not your client. Photos, audio and video are "trivial" in the sense that if you capture the output you're done. Applications and games? It's a cat and mouse game but if "always online single player" wins I think DRM does too.
If they got a developer into a dungeon somewhere, and applied the five dollar monkey wrench interrogation method to extract a working back door - what assurance is there that this back door doesn't work on previous versions?
Sure, with a $5 monkey wrench you can make someone implement a backdoor, but if the developer never made one and doesn't know of any exploits to produce one then beating him to a pulp won't help him find one. Sure I can't guarantee that I haven't made any big oopsies in my code, but if I did I'm not aware of them and if I found one it'd be patched immediately. I'd never knowingly sit around with an unpatched way to backdoor the system, it can only "extract" things you actually know how to do.
I'm so glad that I got the gaming bug out of my system when a ridiculously-priced video card was $300, and mainstream cards were in the $90-160 range...
These cards exists because they make them for the compute/workstation/enterprise market, why not rebrand and sell for some insane amount of money? Just like Intel's $999 processors wouldn't exist without the Xeon line. You get plenty bang for the buck for $150-250 with the "normal" enthusiast cards topping out at $500-700, which I assume is not that much more after inflation. Of course if you insist on playing Crysis in UltraHD with everything dialed up to max nothing will be enough, but many games the last years have been console ports that'll run on any half-decent gaming PC.
First of all, they said TrueCrypt has unfixed critical bugs not that it was compromised. It wouldn't really make a lot of sense either, if it was compromised back in 2012 and you wanted to be a whistleblower why wait well over 2 years to do it? It's not like NSA or whomever would let that sort of gag order expire. And if they're under any kind of pressure now, it would be to discredit the software they made years ago that doesn't contain any backdoors. Which brings us over to the next issue, they claim there's critical bugs but they won't tell anyone where they are so others can fix them nor fix them themselves. I mean they don't just want to shut down their project, they want tarnish the name, burn it to the ground and salt the earth after them and you really have to ask: Why?
I don't think and you probably also don't think that it's because XP support has ended and we should now all go use Bitlocker, so they're lying to us now. Why are they lying to us? I don't know, either they're pressured to it or working for commercial alternatives or threw a hand grenade to start conspiracy theories and get everyone reviewing the code or just went plain nuts I don't know. But there's no reason for any agency to kill off a version that has a backdoor and if there really was a government backdoor wouldn't the best way to be a whistleblower be to point it out? Why this ominous yet vague FUD? The answer that makes the most sense is that they're lying about everything. The developers don't know of any critical issues with 7.1a, but they're being pressured to or want to kill it.
That doesn't mean TrueCrypt is bug free, of course it may have bigger and smaller issues. But I think they're lying about knowingly withholding anything, that they're not working on the code and not maintaining it isn't the same as deliberately avoiding fixing issues. If they had said nothing at all and TrueCrypt had stayed at versjon 7.1a for another few years I'd still use it and despite what looks to me like a best effort they can't go back in time and sabotage their old release. So while I wouldn't trust anything they do from now on, the older code looks good. Why else would they go through so much effort to get rid of it? Somebody badly wants TrueCrypt 7.1a to disappear and be abandoned, the question is who and why.
So Twinings Tea from London would have the site "twinings.co.uk", and that's it.
And who'd go around remembering that Twinings is British, Sony is Japanese, Audi is German and so on? If it's sold here, I expect a localized version of their website in my country's domain (even if it's just a redirect to $brand.com/countrycode, as so many do), the country of origin is only marginally interesting. It makes guessing the correct domain harder without the use of Google, not easier.
No multiple domains for the same company
Let's forbid anyone doing anything about domain squatting. And won't this be massive fun during mergers, acquisitions and spinoffs.
companies only need a commercial address, not a.net or a.org since they aren't non-commercial entities.
The world and their dog already has a dotcom no matter what, you're trying to clean a pool that has more piss than water in it.
Stop the madness, just accept globalization as a fact and move the whole.com to become root domains at reasonable prices and that's that. Google is just "google", Twinings Tea is just "twinings" and let Apple the computer company and Apple the music company and Apple the produce company fight over who's "apple", absolutely nobody wants their domain name to be some kind of unique categorization down a tree, it's "google" not "google.searchengine". Reserve the two-letter domains as special cases for nations and let the free market settle the rest. Practically there's no problem, are you Tesla building cars? Get teslamotors.com and the whole thing is solved with 99% less drama.
I guess you don't live in a snowy place? Opening regular doors does indeed drop snow from the roof into the car. Sometimes I remember to sweep the door seal off with a forearm, sometimes I don't. If I don't I need to remember to brush the seat off.
As long as it has regular front doors it's not that big a deal, open it the traditional way, grab snow brush/ice scrape, wipe off rest of car and then open the gull wings. If it was all gull wing, it'd be different as you could get a lot of snow blowing into the opening as it falls off the opening door or from the rest of the roof. It's not a good winter feature, but it's not a killer problem either assuming they can keep the seals closed and the doors don't freeze in the winter.
Those things go mostly hand in hand, either you can increase performance or reduce power usage. Things get a little more complicated as you approach SoC power levels, but in general the one with the highest performing chips also can scale them down to the lowest consuming chips. There's a reason Intel can sell $500-1000 mobile chips, in that power envelope AMD doesn't have a match on performance so Intel is free to set the price at will.
The problem is not who controls the strings, it is what happens when the strings are no longer needed. A.I. will present little danger as long as a human can pull the plug.
But it'll keep the little people being crushed under the jackboot of tyranny from pulling the plug, the robots do not desert, do not rebel, do not refuse to follow orders, do not have compassion or empathy or morality, do not fear hostility or retaliation. At best you can disable or destroy a few, but so what? No lives will be lost, nobody is crippled - on their side at least - so if they can keep them coming off the assembly line fast enough they have infinite respawns and you don't. And if you do cause some low level operators to desert well the higher ups probably have kill switches to render the robots they control inert or self-destruct. If a small ruling caste can control the vast masses of the population they'll have vast power, riches, luxuries and a working class to cater to their every whim. No matter how high the standard of living becomes this will always be attractive and there'll never be enough fine champagne and beluga caviar for everyone.
To me, what it all comes down to is will. Can an artificial personality actually have a will? Can it become afraid of its own demise? Even if it is theoretically possible, can our researchers and programmers achieve it? Will it be able to reach outside its own programming and decide to eliminate humans? Maybe, maybe not.
You don't need to go there, being able to defend itself with lethal force and seek out and neutralize enemies will be part of its programming. The enemy tank isn't a threat now, but it might become a threat so find it and preemptively destroy it before it becomes a threat. Those civilians aren't a threat now, but they could put on uniforms and carry guns, so let's waste them now before they become a threat. In computer logic it's very easy to end up at such absolute conclusions like that if we kill everyone, there'll be no resistance so it's a perfect victory. Play Civilization or Risk and the AI will keep on killing until you're utterly annihilated. The current "drive by wire" system where they only shoot at what the operator tells them to shoot will eventually go away in favor of more autonomous systems.
I think you're forgetting how much of a gap there used to be between phones - mostly feature phones - drawing <1W for the entire package on idle and even "ultra-portable" laptops that drew 10W for the CPU alone. The early Microsoft tablets had flopped, there was no middle ground asking for anything in between. I had some of the crappy early implementations of JavaME games, WAP surfing and it sucked real bad, that phones could be really useful wasn't very obvious until the iPhone in 2007. And back then Intel was very busy trying to beat back AMD with their Core processors, while AMD was trying to follow up the Athlons with their K10 arch.
Intel did bring out the Atoms in 2008, which were generally hated for performing so poorly but caught AMD between a rock and a hard place by undercutting their value offering and yet still were far, far too power hungry for mobile. With the cheap netbooks Intel probably thought they had Apple contained, besides Apple never went for the low end market right? Except Apple decided to sell a high-end botique tablet and despite costing as much as a laptop the iPad sold and sold big. So around 2010 some Intel execs go "uh-oh" and in 2012 the first Atom SoCs start showing up, that's roughly the lead time you need to bring up such a product.
Yes, in hindsight it's easy but back then... no, I thought the iPhone would be like iPod + phone, a decent music player that could do calls and texts that could kill off some phone manufacturers but that was it. I mean there were apps before the iPhone but they were expensive, crap and not very user friendly and I never expected that to become a big selling point. That an overgrown phone with 10" screen would become popular was also not on my radar. And even if I was an Intel exec and suspected, hitting those power levels, SoC design, mW idle states so early I wouldn't be playing catch-up to ARM would be near impossible.
That said, I don't think Intel is too late... there's been a few nice tablet/laptop hybrids that let you use the screen as a tablet or dock it to have a laptop, to me that kind of dual purpose is rather nice because for going mobile flexibility is also rather important, if I can cover both needs with one device there's less trade-off. I don't want a Microsoft phone though, but hey... I didn't think I'd ever want an Apple phone either but hell didn't freeze over so who knows what the future might bring.
I think you can spin that any way you like it, on the one side they're a many headed beast for Intel to deal with but on the other side they're also in pretty intense competition with each other so they're not willing to share their secret sauce either. You pool resources but you are also at the mercy of a third party which may have interests that aren't exactly aligned with yours. The saying is "divide and conquer", not "spread yourself thin and attack from all sides".
I also wouldn't underestimate the amount of cash and brainpower freed up by AMDs inability to compete at the high end, they're basically printing money in the server and enthusiast market now. Margins and prices are two entirely different things, selling i7-4790K/177mm^2 for $339 makes a bundle and a single Xeon 8800 can set you back up to $6841, I bet Intel pockets thousands on each.
Personally I'm sitting on an i7-860 from 2009, I'm thinking it's soon time to upgrade and while the FX-8350 is barely better it's not really enough to justify the upgrade. So my choices seem like Intel, Intel or Intel.... get an i7-4790K? Wait for Haswell-E? Wait for Broadwell? Either way Intel is going to get my money it's only a matter of how. That's a good position for Intel, not so good for me but ARM is fighting a company with lots and lots of money to burn.
Windows does not have a stable driver interface. What windows does have is the market share necessary to not suffer too much when the interface changes.
In recent history there was WDDM 1.0 (Vista, 2006) 1.1 (Win7, 2009) 1.2 (Win8, 2012) and 1.3 (Win8.1, 2013) and as far as I can tell they're backwards compatible - if your graphics card has a WDDM 1.0 driver you can still run Win8.1, however it'll also cap your DirectX level. Unless I'm mistaken that's 8 years of a stable (but expanding) ABI, it seems like DirectX 12 will require WDDM 2.0 which may be the next clean break but we won't know until Win9 is out. But I agree that the market share helps Microsoft a lot, particularly the market share of gamers despite Steam now being on Linux - according to their May 2014 survey 95.5% run Steam on Windows. Also for all those pointing to Distrowatch, at least 0.64% of the 1.10% running Linux use Ubuntu with only 0.08% verified as Mint...
That's because the people who make the desktop environments just work on those, rather than building applications. It's the same problem in corporations: once you've hired some people into a team to do X, they need to keep doing X forever, until you finally lay them all off. You can't just call X "done" and move on to something else, because then some managers will throw a fit because they're no longer relevant.
Desktop environments are not "done", true my desktop might on the surface resemble Win95, but a lot has happened under the hood on system management tools. Yes, a lot of that is happening deep down in a driver stack but very often it involves exposing new functionality or removing old functionality in control panels, system settings, control applets or whatever. That's just boring maintenance work though, the problem is the UI coders want to do something cool and innovative - they're mostly volunteers after all, not paid to tweak old code based to accommodate changes in other software. I think it's the exact opposite problem, it's work that doesn't get done unless you pay them to do it not busywork done to justify the paycheck. What you have is exactly what you get when people only do the parts of the job they like.
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The NSA's "kill switch" is to take a NSL to your carrier and tell them to kill your service or the whole tower or region for that matter. And if you're really bringing out the big guns there's jammers and missiles, those towers light up like beacons. And whatever exploits they have for the carrier's systems. Besides, I suppose in some WWIII-prelude knocking out the enemy's communications systems and throwing them into disarray may be useful, but I imagine 99.99% of the time they're interested in signals intelligence. Temporarily stopping me from making phone calls until I get on the Internet via fiber/cable/DSL and Skype doesn't seem like a significant objective. Turning the $500 phone that pickpocket or mugger ran off with into a brick on the other hand would have a quite significant effect on petty crime. Unless you observed my PIN and stole the card or force me to withdraw money at gun/knife point the smartphone is clearly the most valuable thing I carry around daily.
I don't think that was a money thing, rather it was an oversight of risk management. (...) Besides, where does this "blame the victim" attitude always come from?
Because it's pretty hard to criticize/discuss/improve someone's risk management without at the same time assigning part of the blame to them. I mean if I was entirely without fault that means I did nothing wrong which means I don't have to change my ways, yet here you are arguing I should take greater precautions which means I did do something stupid which means it's partly my own fault right? It's pretty hard to say that you could and should avoid danger, yet it doesn't matter if you sought and exposed yourself to danger instead.
If we forget all about rapists and imagine I was struck by lightning, you'd probably say it was a freak accident. If you heard I went to the highest vantage point nearby with my kite during a thunderstorm, you'd probably call me pretty damn stupid and say I did a great job of bringing lightning down on myself. Are you really not going to ridicule me if I fall for a 419 scam with a Nigerian prince? That one involves being exploited by another person too, are you sure you won't put any responsibility on my shoulders?
I know I'd blame myself if I left my laptop visible in the car and it got broken into, not because it broken into as such - that happens - but because I made it so much more likely it was my car getting broken into. It doesn't mean I deserved it, it's still 100% the thief's fault for stealing it but somehow my inner statistician is screaming something about conditional probability. And I don't choose the risk factors, the thief decides that a visible laptop makes it interesting. The rapists decide if mini skirts is a risk factor, not the potential victims.
No, it's not just but it's about not becoming the victim in an unjust world. And even if the perpetrator is caught and punished so justice is served it doesn't restore my health or life or trauma that another person is now in prison. I don't want any shit like that to happen to me nor anyone I care about, so I don't think I can help sending out mixed messages saying both "it's not your fault" yet "try harder not to become a victim". If you got a means that doesn't rub anyone the wrong way, I'd love to hear it.
I got a UHD @ 60Hz single stream transport here in the Samsung U28D590D. There's not much video content yet except for a few porn sites, but for stills it's brilliant. Software support for increasing font size is mediocre in many apps, but they're usually functional just ugly. I wish there was some way to just tell Windows to draw a window at 200% size instead. Gaming is cool though my graphics card is choking on the resolution when it gets heavy, I guess it needs an upgrade now that it's pushing 4x the pixels. Overall I'm happy, yes I'm an early adopter but the bleeding edge is more like a paper cut.
It sickens me, that the truth can be deleted by editors with agendas. I've seen the history re-written due to lack of publications of news and tv reportings that are from the early 80's and older. But we can have entire animated tv show episodes articles with great detail, as thats the level of knowledge as historically important.
It's not there because it is important, the trivia is there because it's not in dispute and backed up by third party references. Isn't plain facts regardless of seriousness the perfect kind of information to put on Wikipedia? It's far more structured and cohesive than using Google, it rarely shows up unless it's what you're looking for and it's not like the encyclopedia is going to run out of pages or balloon the printing costs. And most importantly, it wouldn't help. Nobody who wants to write about Pokemon characters or GoT plot summaries is going to get into an edit war with paid shills on serious topics, they'd just be over at some fan site instead.
Wingdings is to fonts what VBA/Access is to application development, so I can't say I feel terribly sad about that.
bullshit, most the dramatic increase in human life and health of the last 500 years has been driven by and is the result of profit-seeking.
Lords were seeking to extract the greatest possible profit from their serfs too, that is not new. Most all improvements to the life of the common man has been hard fought for at the expense of the rich and powerful. True, it has been quite successful at advancing science and technology but the world would not have stood still on curiosity, ingenuity and altruism either. And lately the trickle down effect that created the middle class has slowed considerably and the rich are again pulling away from the rest, where Marx saw machines and factories it's now software and data centers that generate billions while the jobs are outsourced to the cheapest corners of the earth.
Isn't unicode already variable-length integer-ish via the UTF-8 standard? Surely we could implement a version which accommodate an effectively infinite number of character sets.
Before they gimped it to match UTF-16 it had ~2^31 combinations, now it has ~2^16. And you could have extended UTF-8 to a full ~2^42 by just continuing the scheme to fill the entire first byte, so space is really of little concern. They probably just don't want to coordinate a million different people who want to add a smiley or their imaginary fantasy language to the standard.
Or simply the ambiguity of the language. If I can get water from my own well I'd probably say I have "free water" even if I once paid someone $300 to dig the well because the marginal cost of another bucket is zero. If there was one or several bids or I did it with $300 worth of my own labor, doesn't really matter. I don't really see a problem with Google saying a $300 one-time fee for "free Internet" service forever after. Certainly if you've already sunk the cost and is selling the house, then it's perfectly legitimate to promote it as free Internet service for the buyer.
Also, the recent fireaxis xcom is nothing like the original. I like it, but again, it's more action oriented and less strategy. Unless you tell me that strategy is having a super soldier unable to carry more than one grenade per mission...
You know, in reality we'd probably have a bit more than half a dozen soldiers to fight off an alien invasion. UFO Defense was a lot more about tedium and logistics than actual strategy, okay the soldiers need bullets for their guns but I need to restock them between each mission or they'll forget to bring ammo? That's not the kind of micromanagement I'd like to be doing between researching alien tech, building new and unique equipment and facilities while staving off an alien invasion. I consider the chances in the new X-Com basically to say that for any reasonable engagement, the soldiers will have bullets because practically they'll either kill the enemy or be killed before they run out. The reload time also makes you cut down on the spray-and-pray tactics. Standard issue is maybe 2-3 grenades, I agree it's an oversimplification but it also means you get to pick the pros and cons not just throw whichever grenade is best all the time.
The solution to getting in shape is fairly simple. As long as you're in a caloric deficit, get enough protein (~1g/lb of lean body mass), and engage your muscles (I prefer to lift + rock climb + row), then you will shed the fat.
I've been up and down a lot of kilos and quite frankly the more overweight you are, the harder it is to lose weight. While keeping your weight is all about diet, losing weight through under-nourishing yourself is extremely frustrating and slow, with the body constantly nagging you with hunger and being fatigued from lack of the nutrients it can't get from fat. So that's the supply side, on the consumption side it's not much better. When my BMI was closing on 40 my endurance was next to nothing, I'd be exhausted and get pains from wobbling around long before I could burn any significant amount of calories.
Of course I had to stop the overeating that brought me there in the first place, but to go beyond that and get a real deficit going so I could lose weight working out was essential. When you don't work out the body is storing it as fat as quickly as possible to make you hungry again, but when you exercise regularly the body seems to keep more energy around in stand-by. That makes a huge difference in reducing your calorie intake without any herculean feat of will power. Plus carrying that weight becomes so much easier with a little muscle, it won't make you slim but it will make life much easier all the same.
The number of medical problems that actually cause obesity is very, very small. The primary cause in 99.99% of cases is a higher intake of calories than output of calories as activity.
Well, unless you count psychological problems as medical problems like for example depression/bipolar causing binge eating and such. For most it's simply a problem of diet and exercise, but for it's a side effect of a more serious underlying condition.
You're probably not in violation of any law unless there's some bat shit crazy laws about conspiracy to commit tax fraud. Your friend though might be in trouble, depending on how often he provides a "taxi" service to other people. In our tax system the condition (translated) is:
"A sustained activity which is likely to provide net income and operated by the taxpayer at its own expense and risk."
The key points here is
a) Sustained, one-offs or highly irregular activities don't count
b) Provide net income, activities that are mostly a loss are generally not deductible
c) You're not in an employment relationship, you make your own business
This has been applied broadly, if you're a prostitute and make a living from it you're committing tax fraud by not reporting it. Professional poker players have been hit with back taxes. You might say it's crude and after-the-fact but if you lose money it's a hobby, if you make money it's a business. Just like Al Capone they don't need to prove you did anything illegal, only that you failed to pay your income taxes.
A nontrivial percentage of even non-Google apps also build against Google-specific APIs, rather than the relatively impoverished Android ones (the rule of thumb seems to be that, once a role is added to GPS, the AOSP implementation more or less freezes at whatever state it was in and remains there), so incompatibility, even with the absolute freshest AOSP, is quite common.
Or the TL;DR version: Embrace, extend, extinguish. Companies are not your friends, they're temporary allies as the underdog seeks to become top dog but will abandon you when they no longer need your support. They make more money that way.
I doubt it. Missing recordings cannot be recovered from. DRM can be cracked, generally trivially.
Which is why more and more of the essential code goes to live on their servers, not your client. Photos, audio and video are "trivial" in the sense that if you capture the output you're done. Applications and games? It's a cat and mouse game but if "always online single player" wins I think DRM does too.
If they got a developer into a dungeon somewhere, and applied the five dollar monkey wrench interrogation method to extract a working back door - what assurance is there that this back door doesn't work on previous versions?
Sure, with a $5 monkey wrench you can make someone implement a backdoor, but if the developer never made one and doesn't know of any exploits to produce one then beating him to a pulp won't help him find one. Sure I can't guarantee that I haven't made any big oopsies in my code, but if I did I'm not aware of them and if I found one it'd be patched immediately. I'd never knowingly sit around with an unpatched way to backdoor the system, it can only "extract" things you actually know how to do.
I'm so glad that I got the gaming bug out of my system when a ridiculously-priced video card was $300, and mainstream cards were in the $90-160 range...
These cards exists because they make them for the compute/workstation/enterprise market, why not rebrand and sell for some insane amount of money? Just like Intel's $999 processors wouldn't exist without the Xeon line. You get plenty bang for the buck for $150-250 with the "normal" enthusiast cards topping out at $500-700, which I assume is not that much more after inflation. Of course if you insist on playing Crysis in UltraHD with everything dialed up to max nothing will be enough, but many games the last years have been console ports that'll run on any half-decent gaming PC.
First of all, they said TrueCrypt has unfixed critical bugs not that it was compromised. It wouldn't really make a lot of sense either, if it was compromised back in 2012 and you wanted to be a whistleblower why wait well over 2 years to do it? It's not like NSA or whomever would let that sort of gag order expire. And if they're under any kind of pressure now, it would be to discredit the software they made years ago that doesn't contain any backdoors. Which brings us over to the next issue, they claim there's critical bugs but they won't tell anyone where they are so others can fix them nor fix them themselves. I mean they don't just want to shut down their project, they want tarnish the name, burn it to the ground and salt the earth after them and you really have to ask: Why?
I don't think and you probably also don't think that it's because XP support has ended and we should now all go use Bitlocker, so they're lying to us now. Why are they lying to us? I don't know, either they're pressured to it or working for commercial alternatives or threw a hand grenade to start conspiracy theories and get everyone reviewing the code or just went plain nuts I don't know. But there's no reason for any agency to kill off a version that has a backdoor and if there really was a government backdoor wouldn't the best way to be a whistleblower be to point it out? Why this ominous yet vague FUD? The answer that makes the most sense is that they're lying about everything. The developers don't know of any critical issues with 7.1a, but they're being pressured to or want to kill it.
That doesn't mean TrueCrypt is bug free, of course it may have bigger and smaller issues. But I think they're lying about knowingly withholding anything, that they're not working on the code and not maintaining it isn't the same as deliberately avoiding fixing issues. If they had said nothing at all and TrueCrypt had stayed at versjon 7.1a for another few years I'd still use it and despite what looks to me like a best effort they can't go back in time and sabotage their old release. So while I wouldn't trust anything they do from now on, the older code looks good. Why else would they go through so much effort to get rid of it? Somebody badly wants TrueCrypt 7.1a to disappear and be abandoned, the question is who and why.
So Twinings Tea from London would have the site "twinings.co.uk", and that's it.
And who'd go around remembering that Twinings is British, Sony is Japanese, Audi is German and so on? If it's sold here, I expect a localized version of their website in my country's domain (even if it's just a redirect to $brand.com/countrycode, as so many do), the country of origin is only marginally interesting. It makes guessing the correct domain harder without the use of Google, not easier.
No multiple domains for the same company
Let's forbid anyone doing anything about domain squatting. And won't this be massive fun during mergers, acquisitions and spinoffs.
companies only need a commercial address, not a .net or a .org since they aren't non-commercial entities.
The world and their dog already has a dotcom no matter what, you're trying to clean a pool that has more piss than water in it.
Stop the madness, just accept globalization as a fact and move the whole .com to become root domains at reasonable prices and that's that. Google is just "google", Twinings Tea is just "twinings" and let Apple the computer company and Apple the music company and Apple the produce company fight over who's "apple", absolutely nobody wants their domain name to be some kind of unique categorization down a tree, it's "google" not "google.searchengine". Reserve the two-letter domains as special cases for nations and let the free market settle the rest. Practically there's no problem, are you Tesla building cars? Get teslamotors.com and the whole thing is solved with 99% less drama.
I guess you don't live in a snowy place? Opening regular doors does indeed drop snow from the roof into the car. Sometimes I remember to sweep the door seal off with a forearm, sometimes I don't. If I don't I need to remember to brush the seat off.
As long as it has regular front doors it's not that big a deal, open it the traditional way, grab snow brush/ice scrape, wipe off rest of car and then open the gull wings. If it was all gull wing, it'd be different as you could get a lot of snow blowing into the opening as it falls off the opening door or from the rest of the roof. It's not a good winter feature, but it's not a killer problem either assuming they can keep the seals closed and the doors don't freeze in the winter.
Those things go mostly hand in hand, either you can increase performance or reduce power usage. Things get a little more complicated as you approach SoC power levels, but in general the one with the highest performing chips also can scale them down to the lowest consuming chips. There's a reason Intel can sell $500-1000 mobile chips, in that power envelope AMD doesn't have a match on performance so Intel is free to set the price at will.
The problem is not who controls the strings, it is what happens when the strings are no longer needed. A.I. will present little danger as long as a human can pull the plug.
But it'll keep the little people being crushed under the jackboot of tyranny from pulling the plug, the robots do not desert, do not rebel, do not refuse to follow orders, do not have compassion or empathy or morality, do not fear hostility or retaliation. At best you can disable or destroy a few, but so what? No lives will be lost, nobody is crippled - on their side at least - so if they can keep them coming off the assembly line fast enough they have infinite respawns and you don't. And if you do cause some low level operators to desert well the higher ups probably have kill switches to render the robots they control inert or self-destruct. If a small ruling caste can control the vast masses of the population they'll have vast power, riches, luxuries and a working class to cater to their every whim. No matter how high the standard of living becomes this will always be attractive and there'll never be enough fine champagne and beluga caviar for everyone.
To me, what it all comes down to is will. Can an artificial personality actually have a will? Can it become afraid of its own demise? Even if it is theoretically possible, can our researchers and programmers achieve it? Will it be able to reach outside its own programming and decide to eliminate humans? Maybe, maybe not.
You don't need to go there, being able to defend itself with lethal force and seek out and neutralize enemies will be part of its programming. The enemy tank isn't a threat now, but it might become a threat so find it and preemptively destroy it before it becomes a threat. Those civilians aren't a threat now, but they could put on uniforms and carry guns, so let's waste them now before they become a threat. In computer logic it's very easy to end up at such absolute conclusions like that if we kill everyone, there'll be no resistance so it's a perfect victory. Play Civilization or Risk and the AI will keep on killing until you're utterly annihilated. The current "drive by wire" system where they only shoot at what the operator tells them to shoot will eventually go away in favor of more autonomous systems.
I think you're forgetting how much of a gap there used to be between phones - mostly feature phones - drawing <1W for the entire package on idle and even "ultra-portable" laptops that drew 10W for the CPU alone. The early Microsoft tablets had flopped, there was no middle ground asking for anything in between. I had some of the crappy early implementations of JavaME games, WAP surfing and it sucked real bad, that phones could be really useful wasn't very obvious until the iPhone in 2007. And back then Intel was very busy trying to beat back AMD with their Core processors, while AMD was trying to follow up the Athlons with their K10 arch.
Intel did bring out the Atoms in 2008, which were generally hated for performing so poorly but caught AMD between a rock and a hard place by undercutting their value offering and yet still were far, far too power hungry for mobile. With the cheap netbooks Intel probably thought they had Apple contained, besides Apple never went for the low end market right? Except Apple decided to sell a high-end botique tablet and despite costing as much as a laptop the iPad sold and sold big. So around 2010 some Intel execs go "uh-oh" and in 2012 the first Atom SoCs start showing up, that's roughly the lead time you need to bring up such a product.
Yes, in hindsight it's easy but back then... no, I thought the iPhone would be like iPod + phone, a decent music player that could do calls and texts that could kill off some phone manufacturers but that was it. I mean there were apps before the iPhone but they were expensive, crap and not very user friendly and I never expected that to become a big selling point. That an overgrown phone with 10" screen would become popular was also not on my radar. And even if I was an Intel exec and suspected, hitting those power levels, SoC design, mW idle states so early I wouldn't be playing catch-up to ARM would be near impossible.
That said, I don't think Intel is too late... there's been a few nice tablet/laptop hybrids that let you use the screen as a tablet or dock it to have a laptop, to me that kind of dual purpose is rather nice because for going mobile flexibility is also rather important, if I can cover both needs with one device there's less trade-off. I don't want a Microsoft phone though, but hey... I didn't think I'd ever want an Apple phone either but hell didn't freeze over so who knows what the future might bring.
I think you can spin that any way you like it, on the one side they're a many headed beast for Intel to deal with but on the other side they're also in pretty intense competition with each other so they're not willing to share their secret sauce either. You pool resources but you are also at the mercy of a third party which may have interests that aren't exactly aligned with yours. The saying is "divide and conquer", not "spread yourself thin and attack from all sides".
I also wouldn't underestimate the amount of cash and brainpower freed up by AMDs inability to compete at the high end, they're basically printing money in the server and enthusiast market now. Margins and prices are two entirely different things, selling i7-4790K/177mm^2 for $339 makes a bundle and a single Xeon 8800 can set you back up to $6841, I bet Intel pockets thousands on each.
Personally I'm sitting on an i7-860 from 2009, I'm thinking it's soon time to upgrade and while the FX-8350 is barely better it's not really enough to justify the upgrade. So my choices seem like Intel, Intel or Intel.... get an i7-4790K? Wait for Haswell-E? Wait for Broadwell? Either way Intel is going to get my money it's only a matter of how. That's a good position for Intel, not so good for me but ARM is fighting a company with lots and lots of money to burn.
Windows does not have a stable driver interface. What windows does have is the market share necessary to not suffer too much when the interface changes.
In recent history there was WDDM 1.0 (Vista, 2006) 1.1 (Win7, 2009) 1.2 (Win8, 2012) and 1.3 (Win8.1, 2013) and as far as I can tell they're backwards compatible - if your graphics card has a WDDM 1.0 driver you can still run Win8.1, however it'll also cap your DirectX level. Unless I'm mistaken that's 8 years of a stable (but expanding) ABI, it seems like DirectX 12 will require WDDM 2.0 which may be the next clean break but we won't know until Win9 is out. But I agree that the market share helps Microsoft a lot, particularly the market share of gamers despite Steam now being on Linux - according to their May 2014 survey 95.5% run Steam on Windows. Also for all those pointing to Distrowatch, at least 0.64% of the 1.10% running Linux use Ubuntu with only 0.08% verified as Mint...
That's because the people who make the desktop environments just work on those, rather than building applications. It's the same problem in corporations: once you've hired some people into a team to do X, they need to keep doing X forever, until you finally lay them all off. You can't just call X "done" and move on to something else, because then some managers will throw a fit because they're no longer relevant.
Desktop environments are not "done", true my desktop might on the surface resemble Win95, but a lot has happened under the hood on system management tools. Yes, a lot of that is happening deep down in a driver stack but very often it involves exposing new functionality or removing old functionality in control panels, system settings, control applets or whatever. That's just boring maintenance work though, the problem is the UI coders want to do something cool and innovative - they're mostly volunteers after all, not paid to tweak old code based to accommodate changes in other software. I think it's the exact opposite problem, it's work that doesn't get done unless you pay them to do it not busywork done to justify the paycheck. What you have is exactly what you get when people only do the parts of the job they like.