I'm not really surprised, since unlike a lot of engine/rocket powered vehicles the driving force is external, not internal. I've been on a racing boat in gale force winds - not during a race mind you - and the forces pounding us were massive. I was more concerned then than doing 140 mph on the Autobahn in Germany, even though the few that were there from the racing crew said that during a race they'd have set even more sails and gone even faster. It's fine as long as you stay on the boat somehow but if you get flushed overboard somehow - and you're hanging off the rails taking the full pounding of the waves - then you're screwed. And not just a little bit screwed, but really, really screwed. And no, a safety line is no good as you'll be dragged below and drown if you stay attached to the boat.
outside of western Europe and north America, it is taken about as seriously as a Lada full of Clowns trying to qualify for a formula one race... In some places even the idea that you could have 60 quid to waste on a computer game to begin with! But carry on living in your bubble, it is obviously our god given duty to ensure that imaginary property remains obscenely over valued
I'm sure they think it's crazy that there's a market for a $300 graphics card too, are you saying because it's crazy to them they should be allowed to just take it? If so I'd like to help myself to a penthouse apartment on Manhattan and a Ferrari. In every other market it's the seller's choice to set a price and the buyer's choice to walk away (excluding certain monopolies/oligopolies, but computer games aren't exactly one of those). In any other market "set the price as low as I want, or I'll take it and give you nothing" would be considered extortion. Honestly I wish it was the price it was about so I could call them cheapskates.
I recently tried Netflix that launched here in Norway, I left after the free trial month. Why? Because it was crap, crap quality, occasional stuttering if I had heavy network use in the background and many had subtitles I couldn't turn off. That the selection was poor was completely secondary to the fact that it was a much, much worse experience than viewing a BDrip of the same movie which meant I didn't even want to use the service when it did have something I want to watch. Recently I bought an album on iTunes, downloads as a plain M4A file (I don't care that it's not FLAC, it's plenty good enough) and plays everywhere. It does embed the purchase info in the container, but you can edit that out if you want.. it's not DRM, it's not a watermark, it's just text tags. It'll play under any OS and device that supports it, now give me a video service like that.
Long story short, there is no digital equivalent of a letter only post cards and impenetrable safes. Apart from all the people that legitimately want to hide things from oppressive governments or illegitimately hide things from the law, was it ever reasonable to expect that people in general would continue to communicate with post cards? I mean except for the exception that the government might issue a warrant it's undoubtedly a private conversation, so I don't feel any objection to using a secure messaging system, secure chats, secure file transfers and so on. Three out of the last four companies I've worked for has used full disk encryption, they use HTTPS or VPN for all their remote services even just checking mail and they're not trying to hide from the government. Why should it be assumed that I am if I use secure services too?
When you talk of darknets today it sometimes sounds like it's a recent invention, brought on by the Internet. It's not, like for example the "sneakernet" that people used before the Internet was mostly a darknet where you'd only deal with the people you knew not shouting over the rooftops like you do on public P2P. With the "six degrees of Kevin Bacon" the friend-to-friend network of the world is extremely powerful, asking total strangers directly is even faster but that's really the new way caused by the Internet. And it's hardly like Internet was the start of anonymous communication either, people have wanted it before and will wish for it again on the Internet. And despite your hyperbole that "hundreds of millions of computers right now are engaged in acts of terrorism, vandalism, sabotage, and theft, on a scale that is hard to even comprehend" I feel we're doing fine.
WWII had codes we can't crack but governments today are routinely hacked and their passwords dumped in pastebin?
Only because things have to be decrypted at some point. The cryptographic primitives (symmetric encryption, public/private encryption, hashes, MACs etc.) don't change much and have been pretty much rock solid. People still use RSA as invented in the 1970s, except with longer keys. I don't recall any mainstream symmetric cipher being broken either, DES had too short keys (56 bits) but you still have to brute force it. If all you have is an encrypted message you'll get nowhere in 2012 with RSA/AES, you'd get nowhere in 1991 with PGP using RSA/IDEA and you'd get nowhere in WWII with this pigeon code. Back then you could break into the pigeon farm and find their codes, today you can break into servers and find their keys. Not much has changed there either.
If ad blocking was a sufficiently large problem, there are far easier solution like embedding the ads harder in the content. For example transitional ads between pages, DOM pop-over ads, click-throughs that open a pop-up and whatnot. Imagine someone went through dead-tree newspapers and noted the ad locations, then gave/sold you that list to feed into your magic black marker ad remover machine. What possible grounds would you have to call that illegal? It's a legal battle they're sure to lose.
Remember too, that the report addresses relatively short-term savings. Over the course of the next decade, the saving will increase dramatically. The people are going to need less and less training and retraining as time goes on.
I think that's a generous assumption, since most other people use MS Office they'll be constantly training new users, new administrators and figuring out new headaches with hardware/driver compatibility. Here in Norway our biggest OpenOffice poster boy with 20,000 seats (that's fairly big in a country of 5 mio people) dropped it last year and went back to MS Office after 7 years - you'd think they'd be well into the "long time savings" period by then.
Please also note that Chrome is not available for 64 bit Windows either...
No, but since Chrome runs each tab in a separate process it has practically no memory limit (at most 4GB/process). As far as I know Mozilla announced plans to do the same in 2009 but put the plans "on hold indefinitely" = cancelled a year ago. For speed I don't think there's a major reason to go 64 bit, except maybe to win some "computing in the web browser" benchmarks with little relevance to normal browsing.
You're describing one kind of psychopath, the one with no working social antennas at all. The other kind has operational antennas, but rather than invoke feelings like empathy, sympathy and community they're tools of manipulation, deception and exploitation. Both kind of psychopaths would easily stab you in the back, one is just a primitive brute while the other is a cunning backstabber. They're not all pathetic lowlifes any more than criminals are, in fact many of them hold a CxO title. (psychopath or criminals? yes)
Yes, you can offer a deal in civil violation cases, but you certainly do not get to call in police to back you up if the opponent turns down the deal. Please decide -- either it's a criminal violation (then the police are enforcing the law and 600 euro get-out-of -jail bribe is ridiculous) or it is a civil violation (and in that case what "law" is police enforcing, exactly?).
This big distinction between civil code and criminal law is an artifact of the common law system, which is not used that much outside the US. Here in Norway everything is a law, but a law typically has a liability side and a criminal side with different standards and rules. For example any damage to my property I'd have to file as vandalism under paragraph 291 of the criminal code, even if it clearly was done by a young child who is not going to be held criminally responsible but their parents will be held liable through liability rules. Or say my neighbor accidentally cut down a tree on my side of the property line, it didn't rise to the level of criminal negligence but he's still liable for cutting down the tree. It's not unheard of that I could offer a settlement offer but if refused, it would at least in theory turn into a police investigation.
Very often these types of laws say that there will be no public prosecution without a complaint from the victim, so the government isn't going to raise a case unless you press charges but once a case has been opened it is officially a police matter. I just checked our copyright laws and for the most part they're of the same type. There's certainly no general prohibition against the police getting involved, like say in the case above with the young child if they dispute that the child caused the damage then certainly the police can choose to do interviews or seek witnesses even if it's clearly a liability matter, not a criminal matter. Of course, just because the police may do the legwork for you doesn't mean they normally will...
It was Finland, not that Finland is actually part of Scandinavia or anything... it's one of the Nordic countries yes, but Scandinavia means Norway, Sweden and Denmark. And it makes even less sense when you're talking about a legal action since we're entirely separate jurisdictions, it's like saying a North American was arrested without specifying under US, Canadian or Mexican law. The only real piece of news here is that the police has got nothing better to do than exercise warrants because a 9yo clicked some links on TPB. I'd sooner send them out to issue parking tickets if they have that much spare time...
Just get a semi decent PC and a few game controllers.
And what exactly would you play on it? There's tons of great games for the PC but they're 99% one player/machine with mouse and keyboard. At best you'll get a few console ports who kept the console controller scheme as an option, in which case you might as well get a console. Personally I'd not want to buy a 2005-2006 generation console today which leaves the Wii U, but I guess that's also a budget issue. Indications are that the Xbox720/PS4 won't come until around 2015 so there's little point in holding out at least.
As an IT administratator all I can say is your attitude is poor. Why does the average worker need access to facebook and twitter? they are paid to work not to slack of tweeting and updating profiles.
By all means, any employer that wants to evict all elements of private life from work hours I'll happily return the favor and evict all work from private hours. Coming in Monday morning, nope I haven't even looked at my mail since Friday afternoon. Phone? Sorry, I was at my remote cabin/scuba diving/meditating the whole weekend and couldn't be reached. A previous job gave me an iPhone, it was useful and fun and not very locked down so I used it as my primary phone. The current job I heard the policy is that if anyone enters the PIN wrong three times, the whole phone is wiped - contacts, photos, music, apps, games, everything. That's why I don't even have a company phone, I use their webmail portal if I need to and otherwise they can call me on my normal phone. If they push one on me, it'll be in my pocket during work hours only. And I'd still carry my own phone...
Linux isn't going to save you from a stupid hosting company who stops updating their servers for two months so they don't have to deal with regressions. At which point you're probably going to tell me Linux doesn't have idiot admins, doesn't have regressions or doesn't have exploits. It's no miracle cure and the whole "switch to Linux and all your problems will disappear" is getting seriously old. Lots and lots of people have tried Linux over the last decade if not longer, why is Windows still doing fine in the server room? [Insert wild conspiracy theory here, including a rant of anti-competitive behavior and pretty much everything including the kitchen sink except making a decent product.] I went back to Windows after fighting Linux a few years and I wonder if the people here have actually tried it recently or just foam around the mouth by default when someone mentions Microsoft.
So what do you say when a jr. high kid asks you if schoolwork is important?
I'd say that learning is important, grades are a side effect. If the kid is cramming for exams to short term boost their grade over making it stick they're hurting themselves. That they should focus on understanding the subject whether it's on the curriculum or not, that teaching for the test is another short time boost with little to no long term effect. I won't lie to them that eventually you are going to get very grade-focused towards the end but nothing is won or lost on whether you got an A or B in junior high. That is assuming the kid is on a level where he has the "luxury" of thinking long term, not if he's at the risk of failing or not get accepted to the school they want.
As soon as your killer robots have killed all of the enemies killer robots, their people will obviously secede power to you because it's not like they could defeat your killer robots without there's, so it would be stupid for them to even continue bothering.
And then we all sing kumbayah? Or is that when most of the human population get the ultimatum to obey that unstoppable killer robot army or die? I don't think you want to find out what 21st century slavery would be like. No more free countries to run off to. Tagged with a microchip, a GPS foot bracelet, cameras and sensors everywhere and merciless and uncorruptable robots enforcing and possibly supervising the system. Every form of communication like phone, email, facebook and whatever monitored and the rest outlawed. Sabotage? Revolt? Execute a few civilia...sorry, slaves and they'll rethink what they're doing. The big question with any robot army is who have the controls, and who do anyone controlling a robot army answer to? None, most likely...
Robots doing the killing is not going to be very different from bombing from 10000 ft, launching a cruise missile or long range artillery bombing. It's a long time since you had to look your opponent in the eye as you stabbed him with sword and spear. And that didn't seem to help much to stop war, either. Potentially you can do better with robots because robots are expendable, you don't have to return fire until you're sure you've isolated the enemy. Even if you were willing to sacrifice your own soldiers to reduce collateral losses, the soldiers in the field probably aren't over being only 90% sure that's a terrorist or 90% sure the grenade won't kill anyone else.
Of course if you want to act with reckless disregard of - or worse, reign of terror over - the civil population there's no real fighting back. But if a modern army wants to raze the city they don't need robots to do it. The only real game changer I see is that a small clique could hold control over a 100% loyal military that'd ruthlessly crush any rebellion. But most of the gruesome things they could want to do they already got the big guns for. Of course the argument is that clean war leads to more war, but well... we've seen big and dirty war in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I think for civilian more wars with cruise missiles still beats less wars nuking whole cities off the map.
Concealing your true skill level is something different than slacking down to that level. As long as you're getting into the schools you want, it absolutely doesn't matter what your junior high grades were after you finish college/university - and most bright kids do go on to higher education. Knowing this is a temporary situation some kids may be simply showing a bit of street smarts by not provoking an inferiority complex, I don't think just among bullies but also among your social circle that consider themselves your peers. As people grow up they'll act less immature about it and they can return to their true skill level.
The only exception for that is if you're bright enough to skip classes/years, but that has its own sets of pros and cons. I've met a few that were clearly math wizards, at 10-12 they were dealing with math for 15-20 year olds and had accelerated classes with much older students. And they were all kind of odd and I don't mean because they were obviously bright and skilled, but they'd been hanging around older people so much they were like awkwardly premature adults. They saw kids their own age much like an older teen would see a bunch of brats and at the same time they didn't really fit in with the older ones either. If I knew I had a really bright kid I think I'd worry less about reaching his full genius potential and more on not raising a Sheldon.
Not to mention it does jack shit to actually protect them from liability. The law doesn't say it's okay to pirate "this much" material and you're okay. If you pirate at all you're liable. If their business support piracy, no matter the amount thereof, they will be taken down as well. It's simply a matter of time.
Just like the roads will be shut down if any amount of criminals drive on them, right? The law doesn't prevent you from selling goods and services that a criminal could use in furtherance of a crime, in that case you probably couldn't sell a tooth pick without going to jail. It's only when something is popular with criminals and rare among lawful citizens they start reacting. It doesn't matter how much The Pirate Bay and Google are both search engines in principle, in practical reality one is going to get bothered by law enforcement and the other not. Rapidshare wants to point at their actual user composition - not just a few puff pieces for appearance - and say most of our users aren't pirates, we're not catering to pirates, in fact we've tried discouraging pirates from using our service and if some choose to use it anyway, well it's not our fault.
The other practical reality - which also has very little to do with the law as such - is that Rapidfire doesn't want to be the worst in the class. Both because it means they're less likely to be singled out for the next Megaupload-style raid and if they are, they can with some legitimacy question why us, there's many other sites worse than us so why are you harassing us? Personally I think Rapidshare is playing it very wise, they've been challenged in court several times now and won while staying in business and as far as I know making money. Why risk it chasing that extra business? There's always some file hosting company willing to go further and possibly tip over into illegality, let someone else push the limits while you stick on the semi-established border of legal.
If you're stupid enough to commit a crime, and then submit your DNA voluntarily to be checked against said crime You're a Moron and deserve the Darwin Award.
Or drunk or high or on heavy medication or having a psychosis or having some other condition that causes you to have blackouts, maybe a multiple personality condition or some other mental illness or through some sort of denial process has managed to repress any memory of it to the point where you genuinely believe yourself you didn't do it. I remember reading about a case about a rapist that had been convicted before DNA evidence, he'd continue to insist on his innocence in prison and as DNA testing became available then he wanted his case reopened, volunteered a DNA sample and was acting like finally this horrible miscarriage of justice would be resolved - right up to the point where the DNA evidence nailed him as the perpetrator too. A guy told me about a one night stand where he didn't remember even meeting the girl until waking up in her bed next morning, too drunk to remember but according to her not too drunk to get it up so it's certainly possible to have sex without remembering, probably even easier on drugs. He might not have a clue he was turning himself in, stranger things have happened.
So it's not just about "raw performance". In contrast, DX11 level hardware (what will likely power PS4 or xb720), even if likely to be much faster, won't be that different to program for than WiiU.
Direct3D 11 is a strict superset of Direct3D 10.1 - all hardware and API features of version 10.1 are retained, and new features are added only when necessary for exposing new functionality.
Hopefully that means something for games support, I loved my Wii but there was damn many games that were xbox/ps3 only, now hopefully wii u will at least get them - even though they'll run at lower perf levels than an xbox720/ps4. We'll see, I'm getting one anyway.
That. Why do web developers need pixel-perfect alignment so often? I've never seen a web user needing it. Do the clients demand it? Is it because the clients come from the printed world? Is it because they don't understand usability? Or is it a problem that the development community created themselves?
Maybe things are better now but the main reason we went with a fixed pixel layout was because some browser would inevitably barf on either table or CSS flow layout - I had IE, Firefox and Opera showing three different behaviors and for some reason Safari would add a spacing before the footer no other browser would. And you can't mix hardcoded offsets and dynamic flows without creating an even greater insanity, so we depended on the column that'd take up 200 pixels to actually take up exactly 200 pixels so we could hardcode the next one to start at pixel 201. There was just no other way we could finish in a reasonable time and deliver a site that worked on more than one browser.
Application developers are just as bad, try changing the font size in Windows and applications go all shitty because nobody bothered to test at anything but 100% and it's all hardcoded. Sad to say, I think Apple did the right thing in telling non-Retina apps to run at half resolution so the UI will still be usable and only let the applications that have been specifically designed for it realize they are running on a high-DPI screen. I don't know why people here on slashdot are surprised by this, most here should be perfectly aware that most software don't get tested in anything but the default configuration. As a Norwegian I can tell you all about what happens when you change date formats, time formats, currency formats and such from US/English to NO/Norwegian on released products - I'd honestly be shocked if anyone tested a different font setting.
Steam has been a great success in PC gaming --- but console gaming is a very different world. More couch-casual and couch-social. You are most likely to be playing cooperatively or competitively with friends and family in your own living room then engaging with anonymous online partners or opponents.
Maybe... but I know of many people who play cooperatively or competitively with people they know over the Internet using consoles. I think it'd be easier for them to aim for the PC users, offer as much as possible as a PC+Steambox purchase - if you're on a PC now, you can have your games if you move to the Steambox and if you want a beefier machin you can move back to the PC. Steam has some rather unique opportunities to bring people over to their platform if they want.
I don't see why Nintendo would move out of hardware considering it tends to revolutionize the gaming world with its hardware. From the D-Pad on the NES to motion control on the Wii, touchscreens on the DS, etc.
So you listed one handheld, two consoles one of which was released in 1985 - that's 27 years ago, man - over how many generations of hardware? Don't get me wrong the Wii was cool but it's like trying to reinvent the steering wheel over and over again. On the PC the mouse and keyboard hasn't changed in ages. On consoles now you can see the DualShock 3, Xbox 360 and Wii U Pro controller are now near identical - since game developers want the same controls. The Wii Remote/Move/Kinect has become an alternative way while the Wii U controller will double as a regular console controller for games that don't use the Wii screen. I don't think there's room for many more controller schemes than that. I think Nintendo is right to launch now though, both Microsoft and Sony are indicating their systems will live to 2015 or so giving Nintendo a few years as top dog.
So... how did that 5yo come to "implicitly understand" so much that you never had to write code to teach her how to adapt the folding action to the size of the shirt? DNA defines how to grow a brain, not really how it will understand the world it encounters, how it will respond to that world, or the methods of thought internally used to process either of those things. Is there really any reason why artificial creatures shouldn't follow biology's lead in the whole "learning" thing?
Actually I'd say that's a pretty complex question how much the brain is "preprogrammed" by DNA, clearly all the inputs like sight, hearing, taste, smell and touch are hooked up in some fashion with some form of processing, some basic output like crying, a lot of reflexes and instincts and possibly also knowledge are considered innate and studies on twins vs siblings vs half-siblings vs adopted have shown considerable correlation on "how it will understand the world it encounters, how it will respond to that world, or the methods of thought internally used to process either of those things". For example religiousness has been shown to be a partly hereditary trait, even though the specific religion is a matter of upbringing.
But those things aside, sure the brain works on electrochemical processes not magic and pixie dust and there are projects underway to both simulate a brain and the contents in it. That said, even with today's fastest supercomputers we're not even close to simulating a full human brain with ~100 billion neurons - I think the best we've done is the Blue Brain project of ~1 million, so we're another 5 orders of magnitude away. There's a proposal for a 10 year, 1 billion euro "Human Brain Project" that may have a full brain simulator in 2023 out now. In short it might eventually happen as some LHC-class project, but it won't be folding shirts any time soon.
Oh and in case you were wondering, no you can't take whatever that 100 billion neuron brain has learned and easily transfer it to anything less, each neuron encodes parts of the learning. This is no longer a Von Neumann architecture, each neuron is it's own little processor with thousands of synapses and even the wiring of those is dynamic much like a FPGA. If you thought programming was hard before, you should really see it once we simulate the human brain. The programming model is so bizarrely complex we'll need entirely new tools to even understand the behavior, much less modify it. We'll not be happy black-box training computers the way we do people.
Because the console market is a lot smaller than the PC market; Almost everyone owns a computer. Not nearly as many own consoles. Bigger market means more piracy can be tolerated and still make an equivalent amount of profit. And cell phones and tablets compete in a very different market space. That's like saying smart phones compete with laptops and desktops. Yeah... right.
Huh? I never said they competed in the same markets, I said developers seem more than happy to be writing applications for Android which runs on Linux without crying about piracy. You're just talking nonsense saying nothing compares to consoles. And of course the PC market is much larger than the console market since lots and lots of people aren't playing games but you're again completely failing to make a sane point of PC gamers vs console gamers. Who cares about consoles and console-only games? The people who develop for Windows and OS X will have near zero porting cost to a "PC-in-drag" Steambox and the piracy should in any case not be worse. Those developers will be totally indifferent to whether it's a Windows or OS X or Steambox sale and that's plenty, whatever xbox/PS3 developers do is at best a bonus.
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I'm not really surprised, since unlike a lot of engine/rocket powered vehicles the driving force is external, not internal. I've been on a racing boat in gale force winds - not during a race mind you - and the forces pounding us were massive. I was more concerned then than doing 140 mph on the Autobahn in Germany, even though the few that were there from the racing crew said that during a race they'd have set even more sails and gone even faster. It's fine as long as you stay on the boat somehow but if you get flushed overboard somehow - and you're hanging off the rails taking the full pounding of the waves - then you're screwed. And not just a little bit screwed, but really, really screwed. And no, a safety line is no good as you'll be dragged below and drown if you stay attached to the boat.
outside of western Europe and north America, it is taken about as seriously as a Lada full of Clowns trying to qualify for a formula one race... In some places even the idea that you could have 60 quid to waste on a computer game to begin with! But carry on living in your bubble, it is obviously our god given duty to ensure that imaginary property remains obscenely over valued
I'm sure they think it's crazy that there's a market for a $300 graphics card too, are you saying because it's crazy to them they should be allowed to just take it? If so I'd like to help myself to a penthouse apartment on Manhattan and a Ferrari. In every other market it's the seller's choice to set a price and the buyer's choice to walk away (excluding certain monopolies/oligopolies, but computer games aren't exactly one of those). In any other market "set the price as low as I want, or I'll take it and give you nothing" would be considered extortion. Honestly I wish it was the price it was about so I could call them cheapskates.
I recently tried Netflix that launched here in Norway, I left after the free trial month. Why? Because it was crap, crap quality, occasional stuttering if I had heavy network use in the background and many had subtitles I couldn't turn off. That the selection was poor was completely secondary to the fact that it was a much, much worse experience than viewing a BDrip of the same movie which meant I didn't even want to use the service when it did have something I want to watch. Recently I bought an album on iTunes, downloads as a plain M4A file (I don't care that it's not FLAC, it's plenty good enough) and plays everywhere. It does embed the purchase info in the container, but you can edit that out if you want.. it's not DRM, it's not a watermark, it's just text tags. It'll play under any OS and device that supports it, now give me a video service like that.
Long story short, there is no digital equivalent of a letter only post cards and impenetrable safes. Apart from all the people that legitimately want to hide things from oppressive governments or illegitimately hide things from the law, was it ever reasonable to expect that people in general would continue to communicate with post cards? I mean except for the exception that the government might issue a warrant it's undoubtedly a private conversation, so I don't feel any objection to using a secure messaging system, secure chats, secure file transfers and so on. Three out of the last four companies I've worked for has used full disk encryption, they use HTTPS or VPN for all their remote services even just checking mail and they're not trying to hide from the government. Why should it be assumed that I am if I use secure services too?
When you talk of darknets today it sometimes sounds like it's a recent invention, brought on by the Internet. It's not, like for example the "sneakernet" that people used before the Internet was mostly a darknet where you'd only deal with the people you knew not shouting over the rooftops like you do on public P2P. With the "six degrees of Kevin Bacon" the friend-to-friend network of the world is extremely powerful, asking total strangers directly is even faster but that's really the new way caused by the Internet. And it's hardly like Internet was the start of anonymous communication either, people have wanted it before and will wish for it again on the Internet. And despite your hyperbole that "hundreds of millions of computers right now are engaged in acts of terrorism, vandalism, sabotage, and theft, on a scale that is hard to even comprehend" I feel we're doing fine.
WWII had codes we can't crack but governments today are routinely hacked and their passwords dumped in pastebin?
Only because things have to be decrypted at some point. The cryptographic primitives (symmetric encryption, public/private encryption, hashes, MACs etc.) don't change much and have been pretty much rock solid. People still use RSA as invented in the 1970s, except with longer keys. I don't recall any mainstream symmetric cipher being broken either, DES had too short keys (56 bits) but you still have to brute force it. If all you have is an encrypted message you'll get nowhere in 2012 with RSA/AES, you'd get nowhere in 1991 with PGP using RSA/IDEA and you'd get nowhere in WWII with this pigeon code. Back then you could break into the pigeon farm and find their codes, today you can break into servers and find their keys. Not much has changed there either.
If ad blocking was a sufficiently large problem, there are far easier solution like embedding the ads harder in the content. For example transitional ads between pages, DOM pop-over ads, click-throughs that open a pop-up and whatnot. Imagine someone went through dead-tree newspapers and noted the ad locations, then gave/sold you that list to feed into your magic black marker ad remover machine. What possible grounds would you have to call that illegal? It's a legal battle they're sure to lose.
Remember too, that the report addresses relatively short-term savings. Over the course of the next decade, the saving will increase dramatically. The people are going to need less and less training and retraining as time goes on.
I think that's a generous assumption, since most other people use MS Office they'll be constantly training new users, new administrators and figuring out new headaches with hardware/driver compatibility. Here in Norway our biggest OpenOffice poster boy with 20,000 seats (that's fairly big in a country of 5 mio people) dropped it last year and went back to MS Office after 7 years - you'd think they'd be well into the "long time savings" period by then.
Please also note that Chrome is not available for 64 bit Windows either...
No, but since Chrome runs each tab in a separate process it has practically no memory limit (at most 4GB/process). As far as I know Mozilla announced plans to do the same in 2009 but put the plans "on hold indefinitely" = cancelled a year ago. For speed I don't think there's a major reason to go 64 bit, except maybe to win some "computing in the web browser" benchmarks with little relevance to normal browsing.
You're describing one kind of psychopath, the one with no working social antennas at all. The other kind has operational antennas, but rather than invoke feelings like empathy, sympathy and community they're tools of manipulation, deception and exploitation. Both kind of psychopaths would easily stab you in the back, one is just a primitive brute while the other is a cunning backstabber. They're not all pathetic lowlifes any more than criminals are, in fact many of them hold a CxO title. (psychopath or criminals? yes)
Yes, you can offer a deal in civil violation cases, but you certainly do not get to call in police to back you up if the opponent turns down the deal. Please decide -- either it's a criminal violation (then the police are enforcing the law and 600 euro get-out-of -jail bribe is ridiculous) or it is a civil violation (and in that case what "law" is police enforcing, exactly?).
This big distinction between civil code and criminal law is an artifact of the common law system, which is not used that much outside the US. Here in Norway everything is a law, but a law typically has a liability side and a criminal side with different standards and rules. For example any damage to my property I'd have to file as vandalism under paragraph 291 of the criminal code, even if it clearly was done by a young child who is not going to be held criminally responsible but their parents will be held liable through liability rules. Or say my neighbor accidentally cut down a tree on my side of the property line, it didn't rise to the level of criminal negligence but he's still liable for cutting down the tree. It's not unheard of that I could offer a settlement offer but if refused, it would at least in theory turn into a police investigation.
Very often these types of laws say that there will be no public prosecution without a complaint from the victim, so the government isn't going to raise a case unless you press charges but once a case has been opened it is officially a police matter. I just checked our copyright laws and for the most part they're of the same type. There's certainly no general prohibition against the police getting involved, like say in the case above with the young child if they dispute that the child caused the damage then certainly the police can choose to do interviews or seek witnesses even if it's clearly a liability matter, not a criminal matter. Of course, just because the police may do the legwork for you doesn't mean they normally will...
It was Finland, not that Finland is actually part of Scandinavia or anything... it's one of the Nordic countries yes, but Scandinavia means Norway, Sweden and Denmark. And it makes even less sense when you're talking about a legal action since we're entirely separate jurisdictions, it's like saying a North American was arrested without specifying under US, Canadian or Mexican law. The only real piece of news here is that the police has got nothing better to do than exercise warrants because a 9yo clicked some links on TPB. I'd sooner send them out to issue parking tickets if they have that much spare time...
Just get a semi decent PC and a few game controllers.
And what exactly would you play on it? There's tons of great games for the PC but they're 99% one player/machine with mouse and keyboard. At best you'll get a few console ports who kept the console controller scheme as an option, in which case you might as well get a console. Personally I'd not want to buy a 2005-2006 generation console today which leaves the Wii U, but I guess that's also a budget issue. Indications are that the Xbox720/PS4 won't come until around 2015 so there's little point in holding out at least.
As an IT administratator all I can say is your attitude is poor. Why does the average worker need access to facebook and twitter? they are paid to work not to slack of tweeting and updating profiles.
By all means, any employer that wants to evict all elements of private life from work hours I'll happily return the favor and evict all work from private hours. Coming in Monday morning, nope I haven't even looked at my mail since Friday afternoon. Phone? Sorry, I was at my remote cabin/scuba diving/meditating the whole weekend and couldn't be reached. A previous job gave me an iPhone, it was useful and fun and not very locked down so I used it as my primary phone. The current job I heard the policy is that if anyone enters the PIN wrong three times, the whole phone is wiped - contacts, photos, music, apps, games, everything. That's why I don't even have a company phone, I use their webmail portal if I need to and otherwise they can call me on my normal phone. If they push one on me, it'll be in my pocket during work hours only. And I'd still carry my own phone...
Linux isn't going to save you from a stupid hosting company who stops updating their servers for two months so they don't have to deal with regressions. At which point you're probably going to tell me Linux doesn't have idiot admins, doesn't have regressions or doesn't have exploits. It's no miracle cure and the whole "switch to Linux and all your problems will disappear" is getting seriously old. Lots and lots of people have tried Linux over the last decade if not longer, why is Windows still doing fine in the server room? [Insert wild conspiracy theory here, including a rant of anti-competitive behavior and pretty much everything including the kitchen sink except making a decent product.] I went back to Windows after fighting Linux a few years and I wonder if the people here have actually tried it recently or just foam around the mouth by default when someone mentions Microsoft.
So what do you say when a jr. high kid asks you if schoolwork is important?
I'd say that learning is important, grades are a side effect. If the kid is cramming for exams to short term boost their grade over making it stick they're hurting themselves. That they should focus on understanding the subject whether it's on the curriculum or not, that teaching for the test is another short time boost with little to no long term effect. I won't lie to them that eventually you are going to get very grade-focused towards the end but nothing is won or lost on whether you got an A or B in junior high. That is assuming the kid is on a level where he has the "luxury" of thinking long term, not if he's at the risk of failing or not get accepted to the school they want.
As soon as your killer robots have killed all of the enemies killer robots, their people will obviously secede power to you because it's not like they could defeat your killer robots without there's, so it would be stupid for them to even continue bothering.
And then we all sing kumbayah? Or is that when most of the human population get the ultimatum to obey that unstoppable killer robot army or die? I don't think you want to find out what 21st century slavery would be like. No more free countries to run off to. Tagged with a microchip, a GPS foot bracelet, cameras and sensors everywhere and merciless and uncorruptable robots enforcing and possibly supervising the system. Every form of communication like phone, email, facebook and whatever monitored and the rest outlawed. Sabotage? Revolt? Execute a few civilia...sorry, slaves and they'll rethink what they're doing. The big question with any robot army is who have the controls, and who do anyone controlling a robot army answer to? None, most likely...
Robots doing the killing is not going to be very different from bombing from 10000 ft, launching a cruise missile or long range artillery bombing. It's a long time since you had to look your opponent in the eye as you stabbed him with sword and spear. And that didn't seem to help much to stop war, either. Potentially you can do better with robots because robots are expendable, you don't have to return fire until you're sure you've isolated the enemy. Even if you were willing to sacrifice your own soldiers to reduce collateral losses, the soldiers in the field probably aren't over being only 90% sure that's a terrorist or 90% sure the grenade won't kill anyone else.
Of course if you want to act with reckless disregard of - or worse, reign of terror over - the civil population there's no real fighting back. But if a modern army wants to raze the city they don't need robots to do it. The only real game changer I see is that a small clique could hold control over a 100% loyal military that'd ruthlessly crush any rebellion. But most of the gruesome things they could want to do they already got the big guns for. Of course the argument is that clean war leads to more war, but well... we've seen big and dirty war in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I think for civilian more wars with cruise missiles still beats less wars nuking whole cities off the map.
Concealing your true skill level is something different than slacking down to that level. As long as you're getting into the schools you want, it absolutely doesn't matter what your junior high grades were after you finish college/university - and most bright kids do go on to higher education. Knowing this is a temporary situation some kids may be simply showing a bit of street smarts by not provoking an inferiority complex, I don't think just among bullies but also among your social circle that consider themselves your peers. As people grow up they'll act less immature about it and they can return to their true skill level.
The only exception for that is if you're bright enough to skip classes/years, but that has its own sets of pros and cons. I've met a few that were clearly math wizards, at 10-12 they were dealing with math for 15-20 year olds and had accelerated classes with much older students. And they were all kind of odd and I don't mean because they were obviously bright and skilled, but they'd been hanging around older people so much they were like awkwardly premature adults. They saw kids their own age much like an older teen would see a bunch of brats and at the same time they didn't really fit in with the older ones either. If I knew I had a really bright kid I think I'd worry less about reaching his full genius potential and more on not raising a Sheldon.
Not to mention it does jack shit to actually protect them from liability. The law doesn't say it's okay to pirate "this much" material and you're okay. If you pirate at all you're liable. If their business support piracy, no matter the amount thereof, they will be taken down as well. It's simply a matter of time.
Just like the roads will be shut down if any amount of criminals drive on them, right? The law doesn't prevent you from selling goods and services that a criminal could use in furtherance of a crime, in that case you probably couldn't sell a tooth pick without going to jail. It's only when something is popular with criminals and rare among lawful citizens they start reacting. It doesn't matter how much The Pirate Bay and Google are both search engines in principle, in practical reality one is going to get bothered by law enforcement and the other not. Rapidshare wants to point at their actual user composition - not just a few puff pieces for appearance - and say most of our users aren't pirates, we're not catering to pirates, in fact we've tried discouraging pirates from using our service and if some choose to use it anyway, well it's not our fault.
The other practical reality - which also has very little to do with the law as such - is that Rapidfire doesn't want to be the worst in the class. Both because it means they're less likely to be singled out for the next Megaupload-style raid and if they are, they can with some legitimacy question why us, there's many other sites worse than us so why are you harassing us? Personally I think Rapidshare is playing it very wise, they've been challenged in court several times now and won while staying in business and as far as I know making money. Why risk it chasing that extra business? There's always some file hosting company willing to go further and possibly tip over into illegality, let someone else push the limits while you stick on the semi-established border of legal.
If you're stupid enough to commit a crime, and then submit your DNA voluntarily to be checked against said crime You're a Moron and deserve the Darwin Award.
Or drunk or high or on heavy medication or having a psychosis or having some other condition that causes you to have blackouts, maybe a multiple personality condition or some other mental illness or through some sort of denial process has managed to repress any memory of it to the point where you genuinely believe yourself you didn't do it. I remember reading about a case about a rapist that had been convicted before DNA evidence, he'd continue to insist on his innocence in prison and as DNA testing became available then he wanted his case reopened, volunteered a DNA sample and was acting like finally this horrible miscarriage of justice would be resolved - right up to the point where the DNA evidence nailed him as the perpetrator too. A guy told me about a one night stand where he didn't remember even meeting the girl until waking up in her bed next morning, too drunk to remember but according to her not too drunk to get it up so it's certainly possible to have sex without remembering, probably even easier on drugs. He might not have a clue he was turning himself in, stranger things have happened.
So it's not just about "raw performance". In contrast, DX11 level hardware (what will likely power PS4 or xb720), even if likely to be much faster, won't be that different to program for than WiiU.
At least according to the WP page:
Direct3D 11 is a strict superset of Direct3D 10.1 - all hardware and API features of version 10.1 are retained, and new features are added only when necessary for exposing new functionality.
Hopefully that means something for games support, I loved my Wii but there was damn many games that were xbox/ps3 only, now hopefully wii u will at least get them - even though they'll run at lower perf levels than an xbox720/ps4. We'll see, I'm getting one anyway.
That. Why do web developers need pixel-perfect alignment so often? I've never seen a web user needing it. Do the clients demand it? Is it because the clients come from the printed world? Is it because they don't understand usability? Or is it a problem that the development community created themselves?
Maybe things are better now but the main reason we went with a fixed pixel layout was because some browser would inevitably barf on either table or CSS flow layout - I had IE, Firefox and Opera showing three different behaviors and for some reason Safari would add a spacing before the footer no other browser would. And you can't mix hardcoded offsets and dynamic flows without creating an even greater insanity, so we depended on the column that'd take up 200 pixels to actually take up exactly 200 pixels so we could hardcode the next one to start at pixel 201. There was just no other way we could finish in a reasonable time and deliver a site that worked on more than one browser.
Application developers are just as bad, try changing the font size in Windows and applications go all shitty because nobody bothered to test at anything but 100% and it's all hardcoded. Sad to say, I think Apple did the right thing in telling non-Retina apps to run at half resolution so the UI will still be usable and only let the applications that have been specifically designed for it realize they are running on a high-DPI screen. I don't know why people here on slashdot are surprised by this, most here should be perfectly aware that most software don't get tested in anything but the default configuration. As a Norwegian I can tell you all about what happens when you change date formats, time formats, currency formats and such from US/English to NO/Norwegian on released products - I'd honestly be shocked if anyone tested a different font setting.
Steam has been a great success in PC gaming --- but console gaming is a very different world. More couch-casual and couch-social. You are most likely to be playing cooperatively or competitively with friends and family in your own living room then engaging with anonymous online partners or opponents.
Maybe... but I know of many people who play cooperatively or competitively with people they know over the Internet using consoles. I think it'd be easier for them to aim for the PC users, offer as much as possible as a PC+Steambox purchase - if you're on a PC now, you can have your games if you move to the Steambox and if you want a beefier machin you can move back to the PC. Steam has some rather unique opportunities to bring people over to their platform if they want.
I don't see why Nintendo would move out of hardware considering it tends to revolutionize the gaming world with its hardware. From the D-Pad on the NES to motion control on the Wii, touchscreens on the DS, etc.
So you listed one handheld, two consoles one of which was released in 1985 - that's 27 years ago, man - over how many generations of hardware? Don't get me wrong the Wii was cool but it's like trying to reinvent the steering wheel over and over again. On the PC the mouse and keyboard hasn't changed in ages. On consoles now you can see the DualShock 3, Xbox 360 and Wii U Pro controller are now near identical - since game developers want the same controls. The Wii Remote/Move/Kinect has become an alternative way while the Wii U controller will double as a regular console controller for games that don't use the Wii screen. I don't think there's room for many more controller schemes than that. I think Nintendo is right to launch now though, both Microsoft and Sony are indicating their systems will live to 2015 or so giving Nintendo a few years as top dog.
So... how did that 5yo come to "implicitly understand" so much that you never had to write code to teach her how to adapt the folding action to the size of the shirt? DNA defines how to grow a brain, not really how it will understand the world it encounters, how it will respond to that world, or the methods of thought internally used to process either of those things. Is there really any reason why artificial creatures shouldn't follow biology's lead in the whole "learning" thing?
Actually I'd say that's a pretty complex question how much the brain is "preprogrammed" by DNA, clearly all the inputs like sight, hearing, taste, smell and touch are hooked up in some fashion with some form of processing, some basic output like crying, a lot of reflexes and instincts and possibly also knowledge are considered innate and studies on twins vs siblings vs half-siblings vs adopted have shown considerable correlation on "how it will understand the world it encounters, how it will respond to that world, or the methods of thought internally used to process either of those things". For example religiousness has been shown to be a partly hereditary trait, even though the specific religion is a matter of upbringing.
But those things aside, sure the brain works on electrochemical processes not magic and pixie dust and there are projects underway to both simulate a brain and the contents in it. That said, even with today's fastest supercomputers we're not even close to simulating a full human brain with ~100 billion neurons - I think the best we've done is the Blue Brain project of ~1 million, so we're another 5 orders of magnitude away. There's a proposal for a 10 year, 1 billion euro "Human Brain Project" that may have a full brain simulator in 2023 out now. In short it might eventually happen as some LHC-class project, but it won't be folding shirts any time soon.
Oh and in case you were wondering, no you can't take whatever that 100 billion neuron brain has learned and easily transfer it to anything less, each neuron encodes parts of the learning. This is no longer a Von Neumann architecture, each neuron is it's own little processor with thousands of synapses and even the wiring of those is dynamic much like a FPGA. If you thought programming was hard before, you should really see it once we simulate the human brain. The programming model is so bizarrely complex we'll need entirely new tools to even understand the behavior, much less modify it. We'll not be happy black-box training computers the way we do people.
Because the console market is a lot smaller than the PC market; Almost everyone owns a computer. Not nearly as many own consoles. Bigger market means more piracy can be tolerated and still make an equivalent amount of profit. And cell phones and tablets compete in a very different market space. That's like saying smart phones compete with laptops and desktops. Yeah... right.
Huh? I never said they competed in the same markets, I said developers seem more than happy to be writing applications for Android which runs on Linux without crying about piracy. You're just talking nonsense saying nothing compares to consoles. And of course the PC market is much larger than the console market since lots and lots of people aren't playing games but you're again completely failing to make a sane point of PC gamers vs console gamers. Who cares about consoles and console-only games? The people who develop for Windows and OS X will have near zero porting cost to a "PC-in-drag" Steambox and the piracy should in any case not be worse. Those developers will be totally indifferent to whether it's a Windows or OS X or Steambox sale and that's plenty, whatever xbox/PS3 developers do is at best a bonus.