This would be true, if Megaupload willfully stopped paying Carpathia. However, they expressed the willingness to continue paying them for the servers, if they had the funds available. These funds, however, were frozen by the US government, who is thus responsible for Carpathia not getting paid, and as such has taken over the duty to maintain the data integrity.
So if the government ceases your money (or better yet, ceases you), it is their responsibility to pay the landlord rent, the lease on your car, your cable bill, phone bill, electricity bill, utilities bill and magazine subscriptions? I don't think that's the way it works. Those bills will go unpaid, your services cut, your car repossessed and you'll be evicted from the apartment. And the stuff in the apartment that's legally yours? Well, unless you can get someone to pick them up or pay for transport and storage then the landlord can treat them as uncollected or abandoned and sell/dispose of them after a while. The government will not step in to prevent any of this. If this is all a screw-up you can sue the government for damages but your property is probably lost forever.
I can't pay my taxes in saffron, but saffron is incredibly valuable to some people.
Yes but the value of saffron is because somebody out there is actually using it in foods and whatnot, while dollars and Bitcoins don't have any intrinsic value. Without an economy that accepts them as payment a dollar is just paper and ink and Bitcoins only farts of/dev/rand. Even gum drops would have value in a barter economy, so they don't belong to the same class.
Fiat currencies like dollars and Bitcoins depend on future demand, I need to know that between when I earn them and I want to spend them the value doesn't disappear in a puff of smoke. The difference is that taxes are involuntary, people must pay taxes and those taxes must be paid in that government's currency. That means people must have dollars, nobody must have Bitcoins.
Of course that's not a perfect system as government currencies have collapsed and your Zimbabwean dollars are worthless, maybe after the communist revolution they won't take your capitalist money but under all but the most extreme circumstances that a guarantee for future demand. Bitcoin has neither intrinsic value nor any involuntary demand, tomorrow everybody could be trading on Bitdubloons instead.
Now, 7 Billion people, and, as we speak, the figure keeps going up and up
Actually we've reached "peak child", so the remaining population growth will now just be the fill-up of old people. This is explained very well here, if we can sustain 10 billion we're good.
It's the same imaginary numbers on how people would spend billions of their money on IP if only they couldn't get it for free on the Internet. Because everybody would totally spend that money anyway if it wasn't free. Also those 50 billions earned is coming out of someone's pockets, so it'd probably be a million less jobs in all other industries. It's a million jobs, not a net million jobs.
Everything from dungeon layout to boss mechanics to loot drops is done on the server. There is no simple "offline patch" that would let you play without an internet connection. They'd basically be rewriting the game from scratch if they did that (which they won't)
Fifty bucks says I could rewrite the game to use a stripped down 127.0.0.1 server in under a day if they gave me access to both the client and server code. It's fair to say that they won't, but let's not pretend it would be technically difficult.
Except this isn't like process improvements where you can make X% more chips using the same material, going from 300mm to 450mm is like cooking a double batch where you still need double the ingredients. There's obviously some advantages in that you get less edge compared to area (50% increase in edge, 125% in area) which means less waste and less edge yields - which are generally lower than in the center, 450mm equipment will cost more but less per die area however it's not revolutionary. Most seem to suggest a 20-25% decrease in cost, but the investment costs are huge so there's likely to be far fewer players. Intel, Samsung, TSMC, Toshiba/SanDisk and maybe one or two more.
"We'll have the developed film at 11." It's interesting I guess but not really news. Some people base their decision on stupid stuff. "Obama is black" or "Romney is a cultist Mormon" or "Ron Paul is too old" and don't vote for the guy.
You forgot sexist, but yeah that covers pretty much alle the bases. What's the automatic religious bias against a non-Christian in the US? You've probably lost the whole Bible Belt long before you get to talk politics.
That is true, but advances in how accurately we can land is very important for the possibility of a multi-landing mission like for example a Mars base almost certainly will be. It would not do very well to have your cargo/robots/crew/resupply mission impact on your base, or to have it land far, far away. Of course it's possible the micro-navigation - avoiding a small base in the landing area is better than the macro-navigation - hitting the landing area but the more controlled the better.
Easy. You create a voting system in which at least 80% of the key fragments are required in order to open the lock, and you distribute those key fragments evenly among about a thousand random individuals spread around the world. If you can convince at least 800 of those 1000 people to help you decrypt a particular bit of traffic, you can have the data.
Most countries struggle very hard to get an 80% attendance rate in national elections, you think you can get that for any random piece of traffic? I'm guessing that system would either be stuffed with "can't be arsed" nodes that'll lead to an automatic rejection and if you could only actual votes then "information wants to be free" idealists that'll reject anything or "think of the children" moralists that'll approve anything. Besides in a P2P system who's going to guarantee the backdoor information has been properly added and could be decrypted? You obviously can't trust the peer itself, and you won't know until you actually try...
His PD made it clear that he was absolutely not interested in doing so as it was not likely to work and he'd end up with a longer sentence than he would by pleading guilty to all of it.
Never trust a public defender who says you should plead guilty. They're constantly overworked and will recommend that in 99.99% of the cases regardless of the actual merits. He turned down a fighting chance to save 10 years of his life for what? Nothing, as far as I can tell.
Your tax dollars will be paying for his incarceration for fifteen years because some jackass uploaded CP to his file server and some FBI agent noticed it.
And that jackass created, with practically no effort at all, cannon fodder that would clog the justice and prison system for years. Probably even longer if your friend had tried to fight the charges, as most people getting so extremely fucked over would. Then again this is not exactly new, I remember way back I heard of AOL banning people trying to access chat rooms that had been banned. The new sport was of course to rickroll people into going there and getting innocents banned. If you create enough noise, the signal is lost...
Not cryptography - anonymity. At least in Norway in the public debate very many large forums now require full name, and those that still allow nicknames generally require that you activate your account with a cell phone - and all cell phones in the country are tied to your personal, government issued ID, both subscriptions and prepaid cards. It is practically impossible to participate in a way that couldn't be traced if the government issues a warrant. With EU's Data Retention Directive they now want to store who you've emailed with for 6-24 months, right now it's only email but everybody understands that if you can get around it by using any other form of messaging system it will be expanded to include all of them pretty soon.
For now you'll get to keep the contents private, but the government wants to keep a record of everyone you're in contact with. It's not like that has a potential for abuse or anything....
Law enforcement, like anything else that involves time and effort, is a zero sum game.
You have no idea what a zero sum game is, so stop using it. A zero sum game is one where all the gains and losses add up to zero, like for example a poker game with no rake. All the money is simply moving around and one man's gain must be another's loss. If a criminal escaped a life sentence that's a huge gain for him but you can't say there's an equal and opposite loss for the police, it's not like they have to go to prison instead. Law enforcement like most games are not zero sum. Time is zero-sum yes, if you spend more time on one thing you must spend less on another but it'd be 24 hours per day even if all they did was sit around and eat donuts all day. If time is the "game" then that's as good a solution as any other.
Child porn is the reason I can't in good conscience run a camera company.
This. The single biggest advance for the production of child porn is not the Internet, it's the digital camera. Nobody but people who'd feature on America's Dumbest Criminals would ever deliver their pictures for processing and almost nobody had their own private photo lab, particularly not for color processing. Now everybody can do it in the privacy of their own homes. Probably the second biggest thing is that "everybody" is now carrying cameras around at all time, banning an area from camera phones is possible only in the most high-security locations. Everybody is going to bring their smart phones into dressing rooms and I know places that downgraded their security from "no cameras" to "no photography" simply because they had to harass practically everyone to leave their cell phone and people wouldn't accept it.
Well there's two ways here, online and offline cracking. I imagine LinkedIn has some kind of policy to stop people doing millions of authentication attempts online. If they get the PW from linkedin and can crack it offline then IMO linkedin's security has already failed. If you can get the passwords the hacker can probably get most anything else, so it's just damage control - don't reuse the password on anything you care about. In fact it's a bad idea anyway because you've no idea if someone with legal access at linkedin is snooping passwords to steal other accounts.
I'm guessing my account was in there and my password was weak, but they couldn't access my email, they couldn't access my online bank, post some crap on linkedin if you want but that's probably not going to be more than an "embarrassing moment" and then explaining my account was hacked. And the other services I use hte same password for, wow you can now impostor me on a few forums and whatnot. It's the kind of identity theft I can live with, to be honest. I'm far more concerned about my PC being hacked or entering my important passwords on a scam site than I am about my linkedin password going public.
You probably have the same degree in economics that the top bankers have. You know, those bankers who bankrupted the entire banking industry just a few years ago. Those bankers who are still, today, making insane gambles on derivatives and speculation.
They privatized the gains and socialized the losses, how are they stupid? Make a fat bonus check in the good years, cry for a bailout in the bad years, I think many IT people would be happy to crash the IT industry if they could get the dotcom wages back for 5-10 years before the implosion. If you've made enough money for a solid nest egg, who cares? Wait it out, change careers, retire, whatever... the wall street bankers aren't hurting any more than those who rode the dotcom wave.
If we can refine fuel and materials from lunar ores (possible, in theory) then the moon would make a great staging point to fuel up or perform final assembly for long missions. Instead of trying to lift obscene quantities of fuel and finished materials out of a much bigger gravity well, you just boost up the hard to build stuff with as little fuel as possible, and then slap it all together with moon-tape and ExxonMoonble.
All other things equal, yes. Unfortunately heavy mining equipment usually depends on big diesel engines that need diesel and water as coolant, neither of which are easily available on the moon. So for power we'd need great fields of solar panels or something similar and without coolant dry mining would require far more frequent changes of drill heads. Then you have the same issue with smelters, they require huge amounts of energy so add more solar arrays. Then you need huge hydraulic presses to make it into sheet metal, again another power hog so add even more solar arrays. And we still only have sheet metal.
Ore mining is heavy industry, like really heavy industry. Here on earth it seems so basic, only costing a few dollars but on the moon it would actually be a very, very complicated and expensive project. It would be a great achievement if we even manged to create fuel for an empty return rocket, mining ore is extremely much harder. And even if we could do that, it wouldn't make sense to send a rocket down to the moon to bring fuel back up, only make it a bit cheaper to do a moon mission. Going directly to Mars really has few disadvantages that I can see.
Most of europe isn't drowning in debt. Quite the contrary, the only country drowning in debt is really greece, with italy a distant and not particularly serious second.
Greece, Portugal and Ireland have required emergency measures so far. Spain and Italy both have huge problems, I don't think you understand what is happening here. Do you know the credit card death spiral? Where you take up more debt to pay interest on your current debt sinking deeper and deeper into a hole you can't get out of and will eventually collapse because the credit runs out? Spain was circling the drain on their last debt auction, yes your right in an economy you must keep the money flowing. But if they spend even a little more the creditors are going to shut them down, same as they would an individual that's piling on the debt like there's no tomorrow.
That's like pulling the emergency brakes, everything will come to a screeching halt. The government can't just say they'll spend the money anyway if they can't borrow on the ECB won't let them print money. Besides, printing money without any substance only leads to massive inflation because nobody want to actually lose money, if you have a 10% inflation I'd want a 12% interest or everybody will pull out. Sure if the EU stood fully behind the struggling countries but Germans aren't interested in taking on billions of debt from all the PIIGGS, particularly not with an election in a little over a year.
If Sunday's election in Greece leads to their collapse I think Spain will follow shortly, all the dominos are stacked and we're just waiting for the Lehman Brothers. And this time we're not on a high like in the financial crisis, it would not take much to create a really, really deep depression. I have the feeling that I'm watching a train wreck in slow motion, as long as it was on the rails it was okay but once it's off the rails you know it's going to end badly. I don't think we've hit rock bottom just yet, the problems have moved around but they're not solved.
They can ask, but unless it's a problem that can be solved by reading forums and changing settings - which you can ask anybody to help with for closed source software too, I think you would find there's quite many companies that support Microsoft products without being Microsoft - then it's highly unlikely they get any help they can use. Bug reporting on open source is often a DYI project where you get tasks back that normal people wouldn't understand (try compiling with this patch, for example.. tell that to someone who only knows how to install from the software center) or the bug report is simply rejected or ignored for not being detailed enough or accurate enough or having all the debug/crash logs or configuration settings.
The kind of user that needs hand holding is generally not the kind of person to submit good bug reports and in my experience there's trouble enough getting someone to pick up on those without being told to code it yourself. So I'd say the grandparent is correct, you can of course argue about open vs closed development and what produces best software in the long run but most users are not able to take any advantage of it being open source, it's highly unlikely they will take part in any process that leads to an actual code change. Yes, with open source you can hire a custom developer and for closed source you don't but that's not most of the issues they have and of those most aren't so important they'd pay for custom development in the first place. There's a lot of bugs I'd like fixed, there's few bugs I'd pay even $100 (two days at minimum wage) to get fixed.
Practically, micro-development is even less practical than micro-transactions. Just the overhead of agreeing what should be done, contract/commitment/payment/escrow and dispute resolution means you're never going to do paid development for $20 or less, which is what I'd care to pay for most bugs. I mean it's one bug in one function in what's probably a pretty big software package, it's not exactly do or die. And trying to coordinate people into bounties or pledges so a lot of people pool their $10 for a bug fix is also a huge management and timing effort. It just isn't practical to the single end user who wants a small non-critical fix, which is what most bugs in end user software is. Red Hat has a billion dollar business, but it's not someone the average user would go to for help.
Aurgh Jesus fuck NO!!!!! No no no a thousand times NO! If you compress the video file into the same size, 3840x2160 offers absolutely nothing whatsoever vs 1920x1080 because the information is not there and there's no way around that.
Uh, you start with an uncompressed 4K source so saying the information is "not there" is meaningless. Just because you end up with the same size, doesn't mean the same information is preserved. Every codec has a sweet spot, if you have too little bandwidth the codec is starved and you should decrease resolution, if you have too much bandwidth you don't have enough pixels to encode the detail in so you should increase resolution. For H.264 the rule of thumb for encodes is around 0.2 bits/pixel depending on grain and noise, so 1920*1080*24 fps*0.2 ~= 10 Mbit. That is to say, BluRays are generally oversaturated with bandwidth.
Of course more is always better, so a 40 Mbps 1920x1080 stream will look better than a 10 Mpbs 1920x1080, regardless of the sweet spot. But a 40 Mbps 3840x2160 stream would have a lot more detail than a 40 Mbps 1920x1080 stream because it's in the sweet spot, of course a 160 Mbps 3840x2160 stream would be the very best but you can have very, very good 4K for the same bandwidth as a BluRay. You will need 4x as powerful decoding chips though, since you're still decoding 4x the pixels. But knowing the movie industry they'll probably put 4K movies on new discs with new DRM and new connectors with even more new DRM for round 3 of the CSS/AACS/BD+/HDCP wars.
Why is the 'retina display' 960x640? Because that's exactly twice as many pixels in each dimension as the 3GS's display, so trivial 1->4 pixel scaling wouldn't look like total suck.
Yeah, that's what I hope now, make 3840x2160 display, be able to mark stupid apps so they think they're running on a 1920x1080 display. Sorry application developers, but you as a group isn't up to the task of producing applications that work well over a wide range of DPIs. Apple actually managed to make high DPI applications usable in 1/100th of the time we've been struggling with the same on Windows.
Probably not, but far more than today. 20" away with 20/20 vision you can resolve FullHD on a 13" monitor. That is to say 4K on a 26" monitor, less if you got better than 20/20 - that's just the cutoff for normal vision. Okay you can argue if we'd see the full benefits or not but at monitor distance most people should be able to see more than FullHD, if it ever makes sense moving to 8K is a bit more dubious.
I'm pretty sure there's no HBO Go service anywhere in sight here in Norway. There's Canal+, which would work but is a month late. By then somebody is bound to have spilled some spoilers, either because they're from the US or they do like I do. Besides, if you know the series is on a big cliffhanger and you know the next episode is on TPB, well... of course it's probably possible to use a VPN service to get an US IP so maybe I could use HBO Go like some of the other services, but I'm not jumping that many hoops when there's a convenient solution. This is why piracy is so big in Europe, they make a little more money in the short run but they're destroying the very foundation of their market. Once the respect for copyright is gone it's not going to come back...
Not to mention that during the Olympics those stations might be really, really packed and people are much less likely to complain about a free service and afterwards you have a really stress-tested network. So great publicity, low risk and giving Londoners a free taste. Sounds like a win all around for Virgin, it's probably a better use of their marketing budget than many other things.
They're abiding by the terms of the GPL and considering giving more than is required. It's a company, not a charity.
Yet companies seem happy to take other people's charity in the form of BSD code. The GPL is more of a barter with "I'll scratch your back if you'll scratch mine" but I'll take that over giving gifts and getting little or none in return any day.
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This would be true, if Megaupload willfully stopped paying Carpathia. However, they expressed the willingness to continue paying them for the servers, if they had the funds available. These funds, however, were frozen by the US government, who is thus responsible for Carpathia not getting paid, and as such has taken over the duty to maintain the data integrity.
So if the government ceases your money (or better yet, ceases you), it is their responsibility to pay the landlord rent, the lease on your car, your cable bill, phone bill, electricity bill, utilities bill and magazine subscriptions? I don't think that's the way it works. Those bills will go unpaid, your services cut, your car repossessed and you'll be evicted from the apartment. And the stuff in the apartment that's legally yours? Well, unless you can get someone to pick them up or pay for transport and storage then the landlord can treat them as uncollected or abandoned and sell/dispose of them after a while. The government will not step in to prevent any of this. If this is all a screw-up you can sue the government for damages but your property is probably lost forever.
I can't pay my taxes in saffron, but saffron is incredibly valuable to some people.
Yes but the value of saffron is because somebody out there is actually using it in foods and whatnot, while dollars and Bitcoins don't have any intrinsic value. Without an economy that accepts them as payment a dollar is just paper and ink and Bitcoins only farts of /dev/rand. Even gum drops would have value in a barter economy, so they don't belong to the same class.
Fiat currencies like dollars and Bitcoins depend on future demand, I need to know that between when I earn them and I want to spend them the value doesn't disappear in a puff of smoke. The difference is that taxes are involuntary, people must pay taxes and those taxes must be paid in that government's currency. That means people must have dollars, nobody must have Bitcoins.
Of course that's not a perfect system as government currencies have collapsed and your Zimbabwean dollars are worthless, maybe after the communist revolution they won't take your capitalist money but under all but the most extreme circumstances that a guarantee for future demand. Bitcoin has neither intrinsic value nor any involuntary demand, tomorrow everybody could be trading on Bitdubloons instead.
Now, 7 Billion people, and, as we speak, the figure keeps going up and up
Actually we've reached "peak child", so the remaining population growth will now just be the fill-up of old people. This is explained very well here, if we can sustain 10 billion we're good.
It's the same imaginary numbers on how people would spend billions of their money on IP if only they couldn't get it for free on the Internet. Because everybody would totally spend that money anyway if it wasn't free. Also those 50 billions earned is coming out of someone's pockets, so it'd probably be a million less jobs in all other industries. It's a million jobs, not a net million jobs.
Everything from dungeon layout to boss mechanics to loot drops is done on the server. There is no simple "offline patch" that would let you play without an internet connection. They'd basically be rewriting the game from scratch if they did that (which they won't)
Fifty bucks says I could rewrite the game to use a stripped down 127.0.0.1 server in under a day if they gave me access to both the client and server code. It's fair to say that they won't, but let's not pretend it would be technically difficult.
Except this isn't like process improvements where you can make X% more chips using the same material, going from 300mm to 450mm is like cooking a double batch where you still need double the ingredients. There's obviously some advantages in that you get less edge compared to area (50% increase in edge, 125% in area) which means less waste and less edge yields - which are generally lower than in the center, 450mm equipment will cost more but less per die area however it's not revolutionary. Most seem to suggest a 20-25% decrease in cost, but the investment costs are huge so there's likely to be far fewer players. Intel, Samsung, TSMC, Toshiba/SanDisk and maybe one or two more.
I'm sorry, but you're the one making a fool of yourself. The process is 28 nanometers, the wafers are now 300 millimeters wide and will be 450.
"We'll have the developed film at 11." It's interesting I guess but not really news. Some people base their decision on stupid stuff. "Obama is black" or "Romney is a cultist Mormon" or "Ron Paul is too old" and don't vote for the guy.
You forgot sexist, but yeah that covers pretty much alle the bases. What's the automatic religious bias against a non-Christian in the US? You've probably lost the whole Bible Belt long before you get to talk politics.
That is true, but advances in how accurately we can land is very important for the possibility of a multi-landing mission like for example a Mars base almost certainly will be. It would not do very well to have your cargo/robots/crew/resupply mission impact on your base, or to have it land far, far away. Of course it's possible the micro-navigation - avoiding a small base in the landing area is better than the macro-navigation - hitting the landing area but the more controlled the better.
Easy. You create a voting system in which at least 80% of the key fragments are required in order to open the lock, and you distribute those key fragments evenly among about a thousand random individuals spread around the world. If you can convince at least 800 of those 1000 people to help you decrypt a particular bit of traffic, you can have the data.
Most countries struggle very hard to get an 80% attendance rate in national elections, you think you can get that for any random piece of traffic? I'm guessing that system would either be stuffed with "can't be arsed" nodes that'll lead to an automatic rejection and if you could only actual votes then "information wants to be free" idealists that'll reject anything or "think of the children" moralists that'll approve anything. Besides in a P2P system who's going to guarantee the backdoor information has been properly added and could be decrypted? You obviously can't trust the peer itself, and you won't know until you actually try...
His PD made it clear that he was absolutely not interested in doing so as it was not likely to work and he'd end up with a longer sentence than he would by pleading guilty to all of it.
Never trust a public defender who says you should plead guilty. They're constantly overworked and will recommend that in 99.99% of the cases regardless of the actual merits. He turned down a fighting chance to save 10 years of his life for what? Nothing, as far as I can tell.
Your tax dollars will be paying for his incarceration for fifteen years because some jackass uploaded CP to his file server and some FBI agent noticed it.
And that jackass created, with practically no effort at all, cannon fodder that would clog the justice and prison system for years. Probably even longer if your friend had tried to fight the charges, as most people getting so extremely fucked over would. Then again this is not exactly new, I remember way back I heard of AOL banning people trying to access chat rooms that had been banned. The new sport was of course to rickroll people into going there and getting innocents banned. If you create enough noise, the signal is lost...
Not cryptography - anonymity. At least in Norway in the public debate very many large forums now require full name, and those that still allow nicknames generally require that you activate your account with a cell phone - and all cell phones in the country are tied to your personal, government issued ID, both subscriptions and prepaid cards. It is practically impossible to participate in a way that couldn't be traced if the government issues a warrant. With EU's Data Retention Directive they now want to store who you've emailed with for 6-24 months, right now it's only email but everybody understands that if you can get around it by using any other form of messaging system it will be expanded to include all of them pretty soon.
For now you'll get to keep the contents private, but the government wants to keep a record of everyone you're in contact with. It's not like that has a potential for abuse or anything....
Law enforcement, like anything else that involves time and effort, is a zero sum game.
You have no idea what a zero sum game is, so stop using it. A zero sum game is one where all the gains and losses add up to zero, like for example a poker game with no rake. All the money is simply moving around and one man's gain must be another's loss. If a criminal escaped a life sentence that's a huge gain for him but you can't say there's an equal and opposite loss for the police, it's not like they have to go to prison instead. Law enforcement like most games are not zero sum. Time is zero-sum yes, if you spend more time on one thing you must spend less on another but it'd be 24 hours per day even if all they did was sit around and eat donuts all day. If time is the "game" then that's as good a solution as any other.
Child porn is the reason I can't in good conscience run a camera company.
This. The single biggest advance for the production of child porn is not the Internet, it's the digital camera. Nobody but people who'd feature on America's Dumbest Criminals would ever deliver their pictures for processing and almost nobody had their own private photo lab, particularly not for color processing. Now everybody can do it in the privacy of their own homes. Probably the second biggest thing is that "everybody" is now carrying cameras around at all time, banning an area from camera phones is possible only in the most high-security locations. Everybody is going to bring their smart phones into dressing rooms and I know places that downgraded their security from "no cameras" to "no photography" simply because they had to harass practically everyone to leave their cell phone and people wouldn't accept it.
Well there's two ways here, online and offline cracking. I imagine LinkedIn has some kind of policy to stop people doing millions of authentication attempts online. If they get the PW from linkedin and can crack it offline then IMO linkedin's security has already failed. If you can get the passwords the hacker can probably get most anything else, so it's just damage control - don't reuse the password on anything you care about. In fact it's a bad idea anyway because you've no idea if someone with legal access at linkedin is snooping passwords to steal other accounts.
I'm guessing my account was in there and my password was weak, but they couldn't access my email, they couldn't access my online bank, post some crap on linkedin if you want but that's probably not going to be more than an "embarrassing moment" and then explaining my account was hacked. And the other services I use hte same password for, wow you can now impostor me on a few forums and whatnot. It's the kind of identity theft I can live with, to be honest. I'm far more concerned about my PC being hacked or entering my important passwords on a scam site than I am about my linkedin password going public.
You probably have the same degree in economics that the top bankers have. You know, those bankers who bankrupted the entire banking industry just a few years ago. Those bankers who are still, today, making insane gambles on derivatives and speculation.
They privatized the gains and socialized the losses, how are they stupid? Make a fat bonus check in the good years, cry for a bailout in the bad years, I think many IT people would be happy to crash the IT industry if they could get the dotcom wages back for 5-10 years before the implosion. If you've made enough money for a solid nest egg, who cares? Wait it out, change careers, retire, whatever... the wall street bankers aren't hurting any more than those who rode the dotcom wave.
If we can refine fuel and materials from lunar ores (possible, in theory) then the moon would make a great staging point to fuel up or perform final assembly for long missions. Instead of trying to lift obscene quantities of fuel and finished materials out of a much bigger gravity well, you just boost up the hard to build stuff with as little fuel as possible, and then slap it all together with moon-tape and ExxonMoonble.
All other things equal, yes. Unfortunately heavy mining equipment usually depends on big diesel engines that need diesel and water as coolant, neither of which are easily available on the moon. So for power we'd need great fields of solar panels or something similar and without coolant dry mining would require far more frequent changes of drill heads. Then you have the same issue with smelters, they require huge amounts of energy so add more solar arrays. Then you need huge hydraulic presses to make it into sheet metal, again another power hog so add even more solar arrays. And we still only have sheet metal.
Ore mining is heavy industry, like really heavy industry. Here on earth it seems so basic, only costing a few dollars but on the moon it would actually be a very, very complicated and expensive project. It would be a great achievement if we even manged to create fuel for an empty return rocket, mining ore is extremely much harder. And even if we could do that, it wouldn't make sense to send a rocket down to the moon to bring fuel back up, only make it a bit cheaper to do a moon mission. Going directly to Mars really has few disadvantages that I can see.
Most of europe isn't drowning in debt. Quite the contrary, the only country drowning in debt is really greece, with italy a distant and not particularly serious second.
Greece, Portugal and Ireland have required emergency measures so far. Spain and Italy both have huge problems, I don't think you understand what is happening here. Do you know the credit card death spiral? Where you take up more debt to pay interest on your current debt sinking deeper and deeper into a hole you can't get out of and will eventually collapse because the credit runs out? Spain was circling the drain on their last debt auction, yes your right in an economy you must keep the money flowing. But if they spend even a little more the creditors are going to shut them down, same as they would an individual that's piling on the debt like there's no tomorrow.
That's like pulling the emergency brakes, everything will come to a screeching halt. The government can't just say they'll spend the money anyway if they can't borrow on the ECB won't let them print money. Besides, printing money without any substance only leads to massive inflation because nobody want to actually lose money, if you have a 10% inflation I'd want a 12% interest or everybody will pull out. Sure if the EU stood fully behind the struggling countries but Germans aren't interested in taking on billions of debt from all the PIIGGS, particularly not with an election in a little over a year.
If Sunday's election in Greece leads to their collapse I think Spain will follow shortly, all the dominos are stacked and we're just waiting for the Lehman Brothers. And this time we're not on a high like in the financial crisis, it would not take much to create a really, really deep depression. I have the feeling that I'm watching a train wreck in slow motion, as long as it was on the rails it was okay but once it's off the rails you know it's going to end badly. I don't think we've hit rock bottom just yet, the problems have moved around but they're not solved.
They can ask, but unless it's a problem that can be solved by reading forums and changing settings - which you can ask anybody to help with for closed source software too, I think you would find there's quite many companies that support Microsoft products without being Microsoft - then it's highly unlikely they get any help they can use. Bug reporting on open source is often a DYI project where you get tasks back that normal people wouldn't understand (try compiling with this patch, for example.. tell that to someone who only knows how to install from the software center) or the bug report is simply rejected or ignored for not being detailed enough or accurate enough or having all the debug/crash logs or configuration settings.
The kind of user that needs hand holding is generally not the kind of person to submit good bug reports and in my experience there's trouble enough getting someone to pick up on those without being told to code it yourself. So I'd say the grandparent is correct, you can of course argue about open vs closed development and what produces best software in the long run but most users are not able to take any advantage of it being open source, it's highly unlikely they will take part in any process that leads to an actual code change. Yes, with open source you can hire a custom developer and for closed source you don't but that's not most of the issues they have and of those most aren't so important they'd pay for custom development in the first place. There's a lot of bugs I'd like fixed, there's few bugs I'd pay even $100 (two days at minimum wage) to get fixed.
Practically, micro-development is even less practical than micro-transactions. Just the overhead of agreeing what should be done, contract/commitment/payment/escrow and dispute resolution means you're never going to do paid development for $20 or less, which is what I'd care to pay for most bugs. I mean it's one bug in one function in what's probably a pretty big software package, it's not exactly do or die. And trying to coordinate people into bounties or pledges so a lot of people pool their $10 for a bug fix is also a huge management and timing effort. It just isn't practical to the single end user who wants a small non-critical fix, which is what most bugs in end user software is. Red Hat has a billion dollar business, but it's not someone the average user would go to for help.
Aurgh Jesus fuck NO!!!!! No no no a thousand times NO! If you compress the video file into the same size, 3840x2160 offers absolutely nothing whatsoever vs 1920x1080 because the information is not there and there's no way around that.
Uh, you start with an uncompressed 4K source so saying the information is "not there" is meaningless. Just because you end up with the same size, doesn't mean the same information is preserved. Every codec has a sweet spot, if you have too little bandwidth the codec is starved and you should decrease resolution, if you have too much bandwidth you don't have enough pixels to encode the detail in so you should increase resolution. For H.264 the rule of thumb for encodes is around 0.2 bits/pixel depending on grain and noise, so 1920*1080*24 fps*0.2 ~= 10 Mbit. That is to say, BluRays are generally oversaturated with bandwidth.
Of course more is always better, so a 40 Mbps 1920x1080 stream will look better than a 10 Mpbs 1920x1080, regardless of the sweet spot. But a 40 Mbps 3840x2160 stream would have a lot more detail than a 40 Mbps 1920x1080 stream because it's in the sweet spot, of course a 160 Mbps 3840x2160 stream would be the very best but you can have very, very good 4K for the same bandwidth as a BluRay. You will need 4x as powerful decoding chips though, since you're still decoding 4x the pixels. But knowing the movie industry they'll probably put 4K movies on new discs with new DRM and new connectors with even more new DRM for round 3 of the CSS/AACS/BD+/HDCP wars.
Why is the 'retina display' 960x640? Because that's exactly twice as many pixels in each dimension as the 3GS's display, so trivial 1->4 pixel scaling wouldn't look like total suck.
Yeah, that's what I hope now, make 3840x2160 display, be able to mark stupid apps so they think they're running on a 1920x1080 display. Sorry application developers, but you as a group isn't up to the task of producing applications that work well over a wide range of DPIs. Apple actually managed to make high DPI applications usable in 1/100th of the time we've been struggling with the same on Windows.
Probably not, but far more than today. 20" away with 20/20 vision you can resolve FullHD on a 13" monitor. That is to say 4K on a 26" monitor, less if you got better than 20/20 - that's just the cutoff for normal vision. Okay you can argue if we'd see the full benefits or not but at monitor distance most people should be able to see more than FullHD, if it ever makes sense moving to 8K is a bit more dubious.
I'm pretty sure there's no HBO Go service anywhere in sight here in Norway. There's Canal+, which would work but is a month late. By then somebody is bound to have spilled some spoilers, either because they're from the US or they do like I do. Besides, if you know the series is on a big cliffhanger and you know the next episode is on TPB, well... of course it's probably possible to use a VPN service to get an US IP so maybe I could use HBO Go like some of the other services, but I'm not jumping that many hoops when there's a convenient solution. This is why piracy is so big in Europe, they make a little more money in the short run but they're destroying the very foundation of their market. Once the respect for copyright is gone it's not going to come back...
Not to mention that during the Olympics those stations might be really, really packed and people are much less likely to complain about a free service and afterwards you have a really stress-tested network. So great publicity, low risk and giving Londoners a free taste. Sounds like a win all around for Virgin, it's probably a better use of their marketing budget than many other things.
They're abiding by the terms of the GPL and considering giving more than is required. It's a company, not a charity.
Yet companies seem happy to take other people's charity in the form of BSD code. The GPL is more of a barter with "I'll scratch your back if you'll scratch mine" but I'll take that over giving gifts and getting little or none in return any day.