They released Haswell in June, they've barely had time to sell that so Q4 2013 to Q1 2014 is still ahead of their yearly tick-tock. They're not announcing any delay to Airmont which is their mobile 14nm chip and we all know one quarter to or from won't change much in the desktop/server market. In related news AMD posted their Q3 earnings today and their CPU sales are still down, their gross margin is down but on the bright side the console sales are finally coming in so overall they're making a profit this quarter. Inventory is way up but I hope that is due to build up before the PS4/XBone launch, what disturbs me is that their R&D is still going down. That's a death spiral in the CPU/GPU/APU business.
Fully decentralized services are full of spam, viruses, trolls, hired goons, crap versions, corrupted versions and garbage. You don't need the bulk data from a centralized source - a magnet link is plenty - but if you don't want to waste a lot of time and bandwidth you want some form of crowd-sourced service to help you find good files. That means moderation, comments, ratings, votes, indexes and so on that don't decentralize well. You could of course try with some PGP "web of trust" system, but you see how well that's worked out for key signing so I really doubt it'll do better at finding good content. As long as places like TPB are up, they'll be used. If they go down, I guess hidden services over TOR are next. If they go down as well, then maybe but not before...
Well, Red Hat found a profitable market. Apple found a profitable market. Google found a profitable market. Has Canonical? They're a private company so we don't really know but as late as a call this year announcing Ubuntu for Tablets they said they were not. Nor can I spot any big and obvious cash flows to indicate they would be, they're a contender in various areas but no big cash cows. It's the same as when Red Hat shut down Red Hat Linux (not Red Hat *Enterprise* Linux) in favor of the Fedora project, sure RHL was great for the community but Red Hat didn't see how they'd make any money on it. About ten years down the road and Ubuntu is exactly in the same spot, they have the same market and it's still not making any money. I think Canonical is suffering the investor's itch, they don't want to wait another decade to see returns.
The problem is that the HDD is designed, given the head, recording signal, and surface material, to only support the original capacity under the signal theory that covers the current method of recording. It does NOT matter that in theory, the disk material MAY be able to save far more data with a different head, and signal method. Only the current method matters. But the owners of Slashdot will allow periodic FUD articles to appear that DISCOURAGE people from using proper file erase tools, on the basis that its actually a waste of time, because the NSA can still get your data no matter how you erase it.
You sure YOU don't work for the NSA? The recording capability is what it is, but the reading capability is whatever you can put in a $100 consumer drive operating at 100MB/s with 1 error in 10^14 bits accuracy. What you can do with a >$1 million electron microscope at 1/1000th the speed at 1/1000th the accuracy is another matter. You might not want a 0.1 MB/s drive that corrupts a bit every megabyte but for forensics that's plenty. Never mind that all modern drives just pretend to offer you a linear disc, in reality it remaps a whole sector if a single bit fails. How much compromising info can you write in 4023 out of 4024 bits of a 4K sector? It's not useless but everything you hope to achieve with erasing is better achieved with encryption. Nor are they mutually exclusive, if you want to wipe your encrypted drive for that extra unrecoverable feeling go ahead.
I doubt fiber will ever make it in the home market aside from storage attachment. The only way to persuade a typical commodity user to plug anything in these days is if they can charge their battery of it. Will likely see penetration of PoE,PoE+,etc and 10GBase-T, but not much beyond that.
I doubt anything has a future in the home, to the home it'll be fiber (23% here in Norway now and rapidly rising) that plugs into a box in the closet that splits it off into TV, phone, wireless and copper wire internet service and so on. GigE over copper is plenty for in-home distribution, even for compressed 4K material unless you've got a big family all watching different things with quad-BluRay quality. Anywhere you're likely to want an Ethernet port you have wall sockets, so no point in powered varieties. Nobody cares about having a 10GbE home network and it'll take forever until you have >1GBit internet connections. Now I'm not going to go 640kB on you and say forever, but for the next decade I see absolutely no demand for anything more.
If anything the trend is the other way around, you supply power and everything else is wireless even over short distances. That the latest standards have poor range and don't penetrate obstacles well means they work better in apartment buildings due to less interference. Actually in my building it works so well that I'm starting to wonder if it's deliberate, non-interfering materials in apartment-internal walls and blocking materials in walls to adjoining flats. Doesn't seem to have any effect on cell phone signals though, but I receive my own wireless AP extremely well and the others much weaker - I suspect out the window to other buildings in sight. It's the interference that kills wireless performance.
There is masses of half-assed, broken, wretched and downright brain-damaged open source code out there, and anyone who claims otherwise doesn't know what they're talking about. Much of it is written as a quick and dirty hack to solve an individual's problem and then released, with scant regard to long term maintainability. Yes, there are some gems, but they are hidden amongst many many times more garbage. The good thing is you can fix it, if needed, and the software will evolve. But typically commercial software has gone through that process several times before it gets to market, because despite what people here may say about microsoft, not many people will pay good money for completely broken crap that doesn't work.
Many companies have paid ridiculous amounts of money for code that doesn't work, particularly custom and semi-custom code. The NHS in the UK scrapped a >10 billion GBP - that's 16 billion USD - national healthcare system. Vertical integrators that have a stranglehold on certain professions are often full of horrible, horrible code. Insane amounts of spaghetti code have been made by cheap outsourcing companies to go into "commercial software". Closed source has its gems. Open source has its gems. But as a broad generalization it's the pot calling the kettle black, both have a huge spread. Often it's just good vs better or bad vs less mediocre and the question to pay or not depends on whether a $50k+ worker could be 1% more effective - that's $500 - with that tool or not.
Personally I find there's a difference of layers, closed source software doesn't sell unless it looks good on the surface with user interface and hand-holding documentation, comes with buzzword compliance, feature checklists and fancy demos of the capabilities. Open source is more grab it, put it through its paces and see if it works for you. Doesn't have to be so pretty to look at, but be a solid workhorse with detailed technical documentation but often a high learning curve. It's usually more about manpower though than anything else, often you realize there's five open source developers trying to compete with a hundred closed source developers and it's not so much a better of the quality of the coders but simply about being outgunned.
Not to mention the perpetrator-victim relationship, in the UK and most of Europe a knife is enough. Depending on where you are in the US if you tried to rob anyone with a knife chances are you'd get the wallet while you're up close then get held or shot at gunpoint as you're trying to get away. If you have to assume your victim might have a gun (legally or illegally) the only "safe" way to rob them is to control them at gunpoint from start to finish. As I understand it guns are not that terribly hard to acquire here in Europe but they are usually overkill to commit the crime and they rarely let you get out of a situation you couldn't escape with a knife. Unless you intend to kill but most murders around here happens in close relations with victims in "stabbing distance", not gang violence on the street. And of course to an armed robbery you send armed police...
Since you keep making these claims, you must have some evidence. Can you present it? Or is this just a crank theory of yours?
He's a crank. Sure, it might be possible that some things are not all as they seem but he's on a roll that everything is some sort of conspiracy or false flag operation. Nothing is as simple as crazy religious fundamentalists shooting up an easy low-security target for huge publicity and terror factor.
Internet access is unconstainted IP packets. Both TCP and UDP and whatever other protocol you want.
Since pretty much all residental connections I know of block outgoing port 25 I don't think most of the world has "internet access" the way you define internet access. Good luck in your quest to redefine it.
Last I checked, Democracy is what gave us the Surveillance State.
Gilbert: There is one difference. In a democracy, the people have some say in the matter through their elected representatives, and in the United States only Congress can declare wars. Göring: Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.
It's not exactly an accident that the NSA legitimized their mass surveillance through the PATRIOT act.
So it's a tall order but the NSA doesn't have infinite resources nor infinite clout particularly not outside of US jurisdiction. Infiltrators are always possible but also high-risk endeavors with huge political consequences. You can at least try to make the risk/reward ratio seem unappealing. After all, the current standards were made when strong encryption was neither computationally feasible nor publicly available. The main downside is that people don't want to carry around their encryption keys so I think you'd have to define at least three security levels:
1) The server does the decryption for you, trust the server 2) You download the encrypted message and your encrypted private key and must input a secure password (read: long) to decrypt, either once (stored on device) or every time. 3) You bring the encryption key yourself.
Honestly, already just the first one would be pretty damn good.... I want to email john.doe@example.com, the server asks example.com for his public key and verifies through DNSSEC that I'm actually talking to example.com then provides his public key back to my local client/javascipt webclient. I can verify the fingerprint, message is encrypted client side and sent to server. The server transports it over SSL to the destination server, not even metadata snooping unless you 0wn any of the servers or SSL itself. That's my side secure, the rest is up to the recipient and how paranoid he is. For example a corporation might feel their corporate email server and internal network is secure enough, there's no need to have personal passwords for every employee. The mail server at yourcorporation.com receives it, decrypts it and you collect it the old way.
The problem is getting the network effect kicked in, email has value because everyone else has email. If nobody has a clients or servers that talk the new protocol it won't go anywhere.
The usual SciFi trope is that 'Maths is the Universal language', and data is just Maths.
Well, we've never tried deciphering a language that anyone has made a genuine effort to make it so. Math has some really simple patterns that make it easy to distinguish from noise like 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13 or in binary 000 101 000 10101 000 101010101 000 1010101010101 000 101010101010101010101 000 1010101010101010101010101 000 From there I'd probably just repeat [x,y,pictogram of x*y bits] with silence to space them. I'd probably start with "illustrated math" to show like 1 + 1 = 2 . + . =.. 2 + 1 = 3 .. + . =... I think the pattern should be fairly obvious no matter what kind of math they use. After we finish basic math then basic elements as pictograms, the "shell configuration" of electrons should be easily recognizable and universal. After that maybe try to derive the SI units (like kilo = hydrogen atom * big number) and start describing the universe as we know it. Honestly, it doesn't seem *that* hard as long as we aren't looking at a random scroll that may contain anything at all and makes no attempt to be decipherable by itself.
Well your complaint is probably just you. One of said religious groups can mean the whole church congregation, friends, family, coworkers and so on get pestered to stop shopping there. Sadly I think their risk assessment is spot on.
Democracy is bad. Censor that shit right away! -burn all those books.
And if they wanted to repeal the first amendment, it'd be different. But it's a pretty basic freedom to vote with your wallet and boycott stores that engage in whatever business practice you disagree with, whether it's installing rootkits (hey Sony) or animal testing or dealing in "smut" whatever your idea of that might be. The rest is just business, there's no law against having an sex shop in your mall or showing a porn movie in your cinema but if you're a profit-maximizing business you might go for the "family friendly" profile instead. The smart businessmen simply split the front-end while sharing the back-end, totally different name but same warehouses. I'm sure this will work out the same way, the charade seems to keep everybody happy.
Depends on how much the brain drain is permanent, right after their degree I know many, many of my fellow students that were free as a bird and would jump at the opportunity to work abroad, international work experience, culture, language, seeing the world and so on. Then they think about starting a family and homesickness sets in like a homing beacon. It's one thing to travel around as a hired gun to the highest bidder, it's another to raise kids in a foreign culture. Grandparents want to see their grandchildren and so on. Of course there are two parents, maybe the compromise is neither or they both want to stay but if a fair percentage return home with foreign work experience it might pay off well. It shouldn't be ignored that if you have made decent money in the US you're a rich man in India if you choose to return there.
Isn't Mesa software rendering? I've never found it to be anything but abysmal performance. Why does anyone use it?
Mesa is many things, among them a huge graphics library to support the OpenGL API, a reference software rendering driver and a bunch of hardware accelerated drivers. The only reason to use the software rendering is to test accelerated drivers or because you don't have a choice and in the past you didn't really have a lot of choice. Today AMD and Intel has official open drivers, for nVidia there's the community built Nouveau that all have good hardware acceleration support, so it's pretty hard to find a graphics card that will be unaccelerated. But if you buy a brand new graphics card right after release it might still be a period between they get modesetting working (read: you get a picture) and 2D/3D acceleration working where you're back to software rendering.
Businesses want to track you because there's money in data mining and profiling. Governments want to track you for surveillance and control. You think you'd be one iota less tracked if nobody in academia did? No, you'd just not realize it but I guess ignorance is bliss...
Java Op Code is very stable. Since Java 1.0 all that's changed with the opcode is a couple new operations and couple deprecations. There's still around 100 codes total.
This page seems to indicate it's slightly over 200 in Java 7.
My dad installed aftermarket cruise control for the first time because a drive that should have taken 5 hours took 3.
If cruise control is the difference between 3 hours at 50 mph average and 5 hours at 30 mph average then there's something very seriously wrong with his driving skills. Yeah some people don't stick to the posted speed limits but the road rage and percieved loss is vasty exaggerated compared to actual time lost. Spending five minutes behind a guy that does 48 mph instead of 60 mph feels like forever but all it means is an hour's drive takes 61 minutes instead of 60. I don't know how it could take two hours longer unless he's practically asleep at the wheel and constantly down to half the posted limit.
Second, for #2 it's the chicken or egg: As more cars get the parking assists, this'll happen less and less. Also, in many cases you can get into your car from the passenger side and then switch to the driver's seat if it's that bad.
As more and more cars get parking assists it'll happen more and more that it's tightly parked on both sides of your car boxing you in. On the other hand, if the parking assists make an effort to park in the middle of every parking spot where possible you might end up with less squeezed places to begin with.
Humans tend to have a non-zero risk of sudden death, a quick Google search shows that a United Airlines pilot bound for Seattle had a heart attack and eventually died as recently as September 27th. It just becomes painfully obvious if that pilot is the only one qualified to fly the plane, but it's hardly unique. After all there are a lot of small passenger planes going places with one pilot and no crew, if the pilot has a medical emergency there aren't really any alternatives..
Personally if I was designing a language I'd ban the single = operator and use:= for plain assignment and == for comparison. Compound assignment like += could remain the way they are. Is it extremely unnatural and annoying to write stuff like if (3 == foo ), I'd be a lot more obvious and a lot less likely to be a typo if it had to say if( foo:= 3 ) to do something bad. Of course it could still be a brain fart, but a pretty bad one at that.
I hardly think it's a bad thing that people expect you to take part in the effort to take part in the spoils. Imagine you had a farmer who did all the work of plowing the field, sowing seeds, clearing weeds, fertilizing, harvesting, grinding to flour and baking the bread then along comes this guy and says I'm hungry, feed me. Maybe you're a good farmer that work long and hard and actually have more bread than you need, but I'd still tell you to pick up a shovel and help out if you want any. Then it's all tractors and machinery so the guy says he doesn't know how to use one, well you still say then learn and help out. Then it's semi-autonomous agriculture drones so the guy says he doesn't know how to maintain one, well you still say then learn and help out. Or do any other work you have.
With no offense to my current employer which is quite nice, all other things being equal I'd rather not work and have all week free to pursue whatever interests I feel like. I'm sure even the people who don't live for the paycheck could come up with an equally or even more interesting job if the paycheck was guaranteed anyway. So what's really to say that the people who pretend they can't do a job can't actually do a job? I can seem pretty damn inept if I try, it rewards more good acting than honesty. The less people who work, the more I'd demand getting paid for being one of those that do. Unfair? Well it's not my fault you can't do my job, if you want it then train for it and take it. I'd lose the job but I'd also get all the freedoms of not working.
Since then unemployment has been slowly but steadily falling back towards what passes for steady state norms.
Mainly because in the US "unemployed" is a rather narrow segment of those not working. In 2007 there were 7.0 million unemployed (4.6%) and 4.7 million outside the labor force who wanted a job, in 2013 there is now 11.3 million unemployed (7.3%) and 6.5 million outside the labor force who want a job. In other words apart from the demographic changes of a aging population about 1.8 million have left the labor force so they don't get counted towards the unemployment statistics. The employment-population ratio is still 58.6%, it's been at or over 61.5% through the entire 90s and 00s up to the crisis. Yes it's also not getting worse but it's a very, very weak recovery so far.
Sure some companies can say no. However if they do, they will get a few customers who really care, but most want the media and not worry about what they are giving up.
Or they will simply go to TPB instead and not give up anything at all. It's so by far the easiest way to get content that will play any time, anywhere, in any format you want on any device with any software capable for all time without any restrictions. It's not like there's two opposing sides here, there's the people who need DRM-approved gear because they need it to play their DRM'd content and there's the people who don't care because their content is "liberated". And a handful of principled idealists who fit within the margin of error.
Slashdot Mirror
They released Haswell in June, they've barely had time to sell that so Q4 2013 to Q1 2014 is still ahead of their yearly tick-tock. They're not announcing any delay to Airmont which is their mobile 14nm chip and we all know one quarter to or from won't change much in the desktop/server market. In related news AMD posted their Q3 earnings today and their CPU sales are still down, their gross margin is down but on the bright side the console sales are finally coming in so overall they're making a profit this quarter. Inventory is way up but I hope that is due to build up before the PS4/XBone launch, what disturbs me is that their R&D is still going down. That's a death spiral in the CPU/GPU/APU business.
Fully decentralized services are full of spam, viruses, trolls, hired goons, crap versions, corrupted versions and garbage. You don't need the bulk data from a centralized source - a magnet link is plenty - but if you don't want to waste a lot of time and bandwidth you want some form of crowd-sourced service to help you find good files. That means moderation, comments, ratings, votes, indexes and so on that don't decentralize well. You could of course try with some PGP "web of trust" system, but you see how well that's worked out for key signing so I really doubt it'll do better at finding good content. As long as places like TPB are up, they'll be used. If they go down, I guess hidden services over TOR are next. If they go down as well, then maybe but not before...
Well, Red Hat found a profitable market. Apple found a profitable market. Google found a profitable market. Has Canonical? They're a private company so we don't really know but as late as a call this year announcing Ubuntu for Tablets they said they were not. Nor can I spot any big and obvious cash flows to indicate they would be, they're a contender in various areas but no big cash cows. It's the same as when Red Hat shut down Red Hat Linux (not Red Hat *Enterprise* Linux) in favor of the Fedora project, sure RHL was great for the community but Red Hat didn't see how they'd make any money on it. About ten years down the road and Ubuntu is exactly in the same spot, they have the same market and it's still not making any money. I think Canonical is suffering the investor's itch, they don't want to wait another decade to see returns.
The problem is that the HDD is designed, given the head, recording signal, and surface material, to only support the original capacity under the signal theory that covers the current method of recording. It does NOT matter that in theory, the disk material MAY be able to save far more data with a different head, and signal method. Only the current method matters. But the owners of Slashdot will allow periodic FUD articles to appear that DISCOURAGE people from using proper file erase tools, on the basis that its actually a waste of time, because the NSA can still get your data no matter how you erase it.
You sure YOU don't work for the NSA? The recording capability is what it is, but the reading capability is whatever you can put in a $100 consumer drive operating at 100MB/s with 1 error in 10^14 bits accuracy. What you can do with a >$1 million electron microscope at 1/1000th the speed at 1/1000th the accuracy is another matter. You might not want a 0.1 MB/s drive that corrupts a bit every megabyte but for forensics that's plenty. Never mind that all modern drives just pretend to offer you a linear disc, in reality it remaps a whole sector if a single bit fails. How much compromising info can you write in 4023 out of 4024 bits of a 4K sector? It's not useless but everything you hope to achieve with erasing is better achieved with encryption. Nor are they mutually exclusive, if you want to wipe your encrypted drive for that extra unrecoverable feeling go ahead.
I doubt fiber will ever make it in the home market aside from storage attachment. The only way to persuade a typical commodity user to plug anything in these days is if they can charge their battery of it. Will likely see penetration of PoE,PoE+,etc and 10GBase-T, but not much beyond that.
I doubt anything has a future in the home, to the home it'll be fiber (23% here in Norway now and rapidly rising) that plugs into a box in the closet that splits it off into TV, phone, wireless and copper wire internet service and so on. GigE over copper is plenty for in-home distribution, even for compressed 4K material unless you've got a big family all watching different things with quad-BluRay quality. Anywhere you're likely to want an Ethernet port you have wall sockets, so no point in powered varieties. Nobody cares about having a 10GbE home network and it'll take forever until you have >1GBit internet connections. Now I'm not going to go 640kB on you and say forever, but for the next decade I see absolutely no demand for anything more.
If anything the trend is the other way around, you supply power and everything else is wireless even over short distances. That the latest standards have poor range and don't penetrate obstacles well means they work better in apartment buildings due to less interference. Actually in my building it works so well that I'm starting to wonder if it's deliberate, non-interfering materials in apartment-internal walls and blocking materials in walls to adjoining flats. Doesn't seem to have any effect on cell phone signals though, but I receive my own wireless AP extremely well and the others much weaker - I suspect out the window to other buildings in sight. It's the interference that kills wireless performance.
There is masses of half-assed, broken, wretched and downright brain-damaged open source code out there, and anyone who claims otherwise doesn't know what they're talking about. Much of it is written as a quick and dirty hack to solve an individual's problem and then released, with scant regard to long term maintainability. Yes, there are some gems, but they are hidden amongst many many times more garbage. The good thing is you can fix it, if needed, and the software will evolve. But typically commercial software has gone through that process several times before it gets to market, because despite what people here may say about microsoft, not many people will pay good money for completely broken crap that doesn't work.
Many companies have paid ridiculous amounts of money for code that doesn't work, particularly custom and semi-custom code. The NHS in the UK scrapped a >10 billion GBP - that's 16 billion USD - national healthcare system. Vertical integrators that have a stranglehold on certain professions are often full of horrible, horrible code. Insane amounts of spaghetti code have been made by cheap outsourcing companies to go into "commercial software". Closed source has its gems. Open source has its gems. But as a broad generalization it's the pot calling the kettle black, both have a huge spread. Often it's just good vs better or bad vs less mediocre and the question to pay or not depends on whether a $50k+ worker could be 1% more effective - that's $500 - with that tool or not.
Personally I find there's a difference of layers, closed source software doesn't sell unless it looks good on the surface with user interface and hand-holding documentation, comes with buzzword compliance, feature checklists and fancy demos of the capabilities. Open source is more grab it, put it through its paces and see if it works for you. Doesn't have to be so pretty to look at, but be a solid workhorse with detailed technical documentation but often a high learning curve. It's usually more about manpower though than anything else, often you realize there's five open source developers trying to compete with a hundred closed source developers and it's not so much a better of the quality of the coders but simply about being outgunned.
Not to mention the perpetrator-victim relationship, in the UK and most of Europe a knife is enough. Depending on where you are in the US if you tried to rob anyone with a knife chances are you'd get the wallet while you're up close then get held or shot at gunpoint as you're trying to get away. If you have to assume your victim might have a gun (legally or illegally) the only "safe" way to rob them is to control them at gunpoint from start to finish. As I understand it guns are not that terribly hard to acquire here in Europe but they are usually overkill to commit the crime and they rarely let you get out of a situation you couldn't escape with a knife. Unless you intend to kill but most murders around here happens in close relations with victims in "stabbing distance", not gang violence on the street. And of course to an armed robbery you send armed police...
Since you keep making these claims, you must have some evidence. Can you present it? Or is this just a crank theory of yours?
He's a crank. Sure, it might be possible that some things are not all as they seem but he's on a roll that everything is some sort of conspiracy or false flag operation. Nothing is as simple as crazy religious fundamentalists shooting up an easy low-security target for huge publicity and terror factor.
Internet access is unconstainted IP packets. Both TCP and UDP and whatever other protocol you want.
Since pretty much all residental connections I know of block outgoing port 25 I don't think most of the world has "internet access" the way you define internet access. Good luck in your quest to redefine it.
Last I checked, Democracy is what gave us the Surveillance State.
Gilbert: There is one difference. In a democracy, the people have some say in the matter through their elected representatives, and in the United States only Congress can declare wars.
Göring: Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.
It's not exactly an accident that the NSA legitimized their mass surveillance through the PATRIOT act.
So it's a tall order but the NSA doesn't have infinite resources nor infinite clout particularly not outside of US jurisdiction. Infiltrators are always possible but also high-risk endeavors with huge political consequences. You can at least try to make the risk/reward ratio seem unappealing. After all, the current standards were made when strong encryption was neither computationally feasible nor publicly available. The main downside is that people don't want to carry around their encryption keys so I think you'd have to define at least three security levels:
1) The server does the decryption for you, trust the server
2) You download the encrypted message and your encrypted private key and must input a secure password (read: long) to decrypt, either once (stored on device) or every time.
3) You bring the encryption key yourself.
Honestly, already just the first one would be pretty damn good.... I want to email john.doe@example.com, the server asks example.com for his public key and verifies through DNSSEC that I'm actually talking to example.com then provides his public key back to my local client/javascipt webclient. I can verify the fingerprint, message is encrypted client side and sent to server. The server transports it over SSL to the destination server, not even metadata snooping unless you 0wn any of the servers or SSL itself. That's my side secure, the rest is up to the recipient and how paranoid he is. For example a corporation might feel their corporate email server and internal network is secure enough, there's no need to have personal passwords for every employee. The mail server at yourcorporation.com receives it, decrypts it and you collect it the old way.
The problem is getting the network effect kicked in, email has value because everyone else has email. If nobody has a clients or servers that talk the new protocol it won't go anywhere.
The usual SciFi trope is that 'Maths is the Universal language', and data is just Maths.
Well, we've never tried deciphering a language that anyone has made a genuine effort to make it so. Math has some really simple patterns that make it easy to distinguish from noise like 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13 or in binary .. ...
000
101 000
10101 000
101010101 000
1010101010101 000
101010101010101010101 000
1010101010101010101010101 000
From there I'd probably just repeat [x,y,pictogram of x*y bits] with silence to space them. I'd probably start with "illustrated math" to show like
1 + 1 = 2
. + . =
2 + 1 = 3
.. + . =
I think the pattern should be fairly obvious no matter what kind of math they use. After we finish basic math then basic elements as pictograms, the "shell configuration" of electrons should be easily recognizable and universal. After that maybe try to derive the SI units (like kilo = hydrogen atom * big number) and start describing the universe as we know it. Honestly, it doesn't seem *that* hard as long as we aren't looking at a random scroll that may contain anything at all and makes no attempt to be decipherable by itself.
Well your complaint is probably just you. One of said religious groups can mean the whole church congregation, friends, family, coworkers and so on get pestered to stop shopping there. Sadly I think their risk assessment is spot on.
Democracy is bad. Censor that shit right away! -burn all those books.
And if they wanted to repeal the first amendment, it'd be different. But it's a pretty basic freedom to vote with your wallet and boycott stores that engage in whatever business practice you disagree with, whether it's installing rootkits (hey Sony) or animal testing or dealing in "smut" whatever your idea of that might be. The rest is just business, there's no law against having an sex shop in your mall or showing a porn movie in your cinema but if you're a profit-maximizing business you might go for the "family friendly" profile instead. The smart businessmen simply split the front-end while sharing the back-end, totally different name but same warehouses. I'm sure this will work out the same way, the charade seems to keep everybody happy.
Depends on how much the brain drain is permanent, right after their degree I know many, many of my fellow students that were free as a bird and would jump at the opportunity to work abroad, international work experience, culture, language, seeing the world and so on. Then they think about starting a family and homesickness sets in like a homing beacon. It's one thing to travel around as a hired gun to the highest bidder, it's another to raise kids in a foreign culture. Grandparents want to see their grandchildren and so on. Of course there are two parents, maybe the compromise is neither or they both want to stay but if a fair percentage return home with foreign work experience it might pay off well. It shouldn't be ignored that if you have made decent money in the US you're a rich man in India if you choose to return there.
Isn't Mesa software rendering? I've never found it to be anything but abysmal performance. Why does anyone use it?
Mesa is many things, among them a huge graphics library to support the OpenGL API, a reference software rendering driver and a bunch of hardware accelerated drivers. The only reason to use the software rendering is to test accelerated drivers or because you don't have a choice and in the past you didn't really have a lot of choice. Today AMD and Intel has official open drivers, for nVidia there's the community built Nouveau that all have good hardware acceleration support, so it's pretty hard to find a graphics card that will be unaccelerated. But if you buy a brand new graphics card right after release it might still be a period between they get modesetting working (read: you get a picture) and 2D/3D acceleration working where you're back to software rendering.
Businesses want to track you because there's money in data mining and profiling. Governments want to track you for surveillance and control. You think you'd be one iota less tracked if nobody in academia did? No, you'd just not realize it but I guess ignorance is bliss...
Java Op Code is very stable. Since Java 1.0 all that's changed with the opcode is a couple new operations and couple deprecations. There's still around 100 codes total.
This page seems to indicate it's slightly over 200 in Java 7.
My dad installed aftermarket cruise control for the first time because a drive that should have taken 5 hours took 3.
If cruise control is the difference between 3 hours at 50 mph average and 5 hours at 30 mph average then there's something very seriously wrong with his driving skills. Yeah some people don't stick to the posted speed limits but the road rage and percieved loss is vasty exaggerated compared to actual time lost. Spending five minutes behind a guy that does 48 mph instead of 60 mph feels like forever but all it means is an hour's drive takes 61 minutes instead of 60. I don't know how it could take two hours longer unless he's practically asleep at the wheel and constantly down to half the posted limit.
Second, for #2 it's the chicken or egg: As more cars get the parking assists, this'll happen less and less. Also, in many cases you can get into your car from the passenger side and then switch to the driver's seat if it's that bad.
As more and more cars get parking assists it'll happen more and more that it's tightly parked on both sides of your car boxing you in. On the other hand, if the parking assists make an effort to park in the middle of every parking spot where possible you might end up with less squeezed places to begin with.
Typical pilots don't die mid-flight.
Humans tend to have a non-zero risk of sudden death, a quick Google search shows that a United Airlines pilot bound for Seattle had a heart attack and eventually died as recently as September 27th. It just becomes painfully obvious if that pilot is the only one qualified to fly the plane, but it's hardly unique. After all there are a lot of small passenger planes going places with one pilot and no crew, if the pilot has a medical emergency there aren't really any alternatives..
Personally if I was designing a language I'd ban the single = operator and use := for plain assignment and == for comparison. Compound assignment like += could remain the way they are. Is it extremely unnatural and annoying to write stuff like if (3 == foo ), I'd be a lot more obvious and a lot less likely to be a typo if it had to say if( foo := 3 ) to do something bad. Of course it could still be a brain fart, but a pretty bad one at that.
I hardly think it's a bad thing that people expect you to take part in the effort to take part in the spoils. Imagine you had a farmer who did all the work of plowing the field, sowing seeds, clearing weeds, fertilizing, harvesting, grinding to flour and baking the bread then along comes this guy and says I'm hungry, feed me. Maybe you're a good farmer that work long and hard and actually have more bread than you need, but I'd still tell you to pick up a shovel and help out if you want any. Then it's all tractors and machinery so the guy says he doesn't know how to use one, well you still say then learn and help out. Then it's semi-autonomous agriculture drones so the guy says he doesn't know how to maintain one, well you still say then learn and help out. Or do any other work you have.
With no offense to my current employer which is quite nice, all other things being equal I'd rather not work and have all week free to pursue whatever interests I feel like. I'm sure even the people who don't live for the paycheck could come up with an equally or even more interesting job if the paycheck was guaranteed anyway. So what's really to say that the people who pretend they can't do a job can't actually do a job? I can seem pretty damn inept if I try, it rewards more good acting than honesty. The less people who work, the more I'd demand getting paid for being one of those that do. Unfair? Well it's not my fault you can't do my job, if you want it then train for it and take it. I'd lose the job but I'd also get all the freedoms of not working.
Since then unemployment has been slowly but steadily falling back towards what passes for steady state norms.
Mainly because in the US "unemployed" is a rather narrow segment of those not working. In 2007 there were 7.0 million unemployed (4.6%) and 4.7 million outside the labor force who wanted a job, in 2013 there is now 11.3 million unemployed (7.3%) and 6.5 million outside the labor force who want a job. In other words apart from the demographic changes of a aging population about 1.8 million have left the labor force so they don't get counted towards the unemployment statistics. The employment-population ratio is still 58.6%, it's been at or over 61.5% through the entire 90s and 00s up to the crisis. Yes it's also not getting worse but it's a very, very weak recovery so far.
Sure some companies can say no. However if they do, they will get a few customers who really care, but most want the media and not worry about what they are giving up.
Or they will simply go to TPB instead and not give up anything at all. It's so by far the easiest way to get content that will play any time, anywhere, in any format you want on any device with any software capable for all time without any restrictions. It's not like there's two opposing sides here, there's the people who need DRM-approved gear because they need it to play their DRM'd content and there's the people who don't care because their content is "liberated". And a handful of principled idealists who fit within the margin of error.