Of course the "top extreme" of anything will always be ridiculously poor value for money. A i7-2600k @ 3.4GHz has a Passmark score of 8488 for $317 at 95W released Q1 2011, correcting for inflation it's pretty much same price, same power, +50% performance increase in six years or about 7% annually. That's ten years to double performance, the next generation will have eight times the performance in 30 years. Granted if it was anything other than computers it wouldn't be that bad, but if you compare the 2010s to any other decade since they discovered the transistor in the 1950s it's like hitting a brick wall. The real question is whether it's just because AMD quit or if Intel really has run out of tricks.
For me, docking stations and big monitors allow me to use my laptop in a reasonably comfortable work environment. But, there are still use cases for desktop PCs, especially those that aren't shoved into the back of an all-in-one monitor. You're not going to let a call center employee in a regulated, locked down environment pull out his iPad or laptop to work, for example.
No, but neither is he likely to use a proper desktop, Thin clients and virtualization are so much easier to deal with if you consider fixed locations and centralized control to be a feature. Sure there are those with particular workstation or input/output device needs but not the average corporate desktop. If it wasn't for gaming I think the desktop would be relegated to a small, small niche.
Ride sharing (zip cars, and eventually automated vehicles) will be the future, but people do need to be aware in such a future, people will most likely not "own" cars any longer. But for this to work, they can only be a last leg. Ride shares and self driving cars will NOT solve the transportation gridlock problem. Cars simply do not have the capacity of real public transit:
I think for long or cost sensitive rides most people would be willing to swap vehicles, like you do with bus/tram/subway lines in public transport or how you could combine that and taxis today. The big difference is that SDCs barely cost money when they're not moving. Taxi companies set big minimums because the driver has to make a decent wage per hour worked, idle time and unpaid overhead costs tons of money. And once you're out working, you don't turn on and off like a faucet. Sure it would mean more money tied up in the SDC fleet causing capital costs but if you put them in rotation so they all run a lot of miles the operational costs should be almost identical. So I see a lot of potential in hybrid solutions where you merge/split/shuffle rides on demand. The two main reasons people don't use public transport is that it's not a door-to-door ride and that you can spend a lot of time waiting.
I think SDC industry can do a lot not just on the former but also on the latter by "insuring" the passenger like for example that you're stuck in heavy traffic and can't catch the bus or the bus is severely delayed they make it a taxi ride. If they can deliver you 95% of the time and you get a "free" taxi ride 5% of the time that might be a lot more appealing than today where you're often screwed when that happens. Of course it won't protect you from all traffic chaos, but nothing is more frustrating sitting the on the bus steaming known that if only you'd taken the car you'd already be there long ago.
Back before development was professionalized, was Christmas a period of rapid change as kernel hackers finally had time off work to really dig into Linux?
I doubt it. Many would be students and for Christmas they are busy with family things. The days it's soggy, windy and overall shitty to be out in late autumn or early spring long before exams would probably be the bulk of it.
Can someone please explain how FreeSync2 has any influence at all on any of that?
FreeSync 2 comes with a developer API that will let developers access a HDR pipeline on non-HDR operating systems (that's the extended gamut and brightness bit) while skipping the HDR display's layer of tone mapping (that's the lower latency). If the developers don't do anything or you already do HDR, you only get the latter. And they can do that because FreeSync 2 monitors tell the GPU what HDR capabilities they have so the GPU can deliver a custom tailored output and the monitor display it unprocessed.
I think that for playing alone, I could now be reasonably content with what's on offer now. There are enough games on Windows that I don't get around to playing them all, so basically it'd just narrow the field. But I have friends and we play games like GTA V and Overwatch and I don't want to be left out. Dual booting is extremely annoying. Buying two high end graphics cards is out. So as much as my inner nerd wants to say yes, it's still no. I might put in my previous graphics card and play lighter titles though, it's on the substitute bench while before it was up in the stands selling hot dogs. And Apple - still the second biggest graphics market - had to go off and do their own thing with Metal instead of Vulkan so there'll be no joint force against DirectX. I'm hoping things will change before Win7 goes out of support, but I'm not optimistic.
You keep insulting me, the customer. I will not be doing business with you and will slander your name.
Dickhead clients will slander you anyway because they use up all your reasonableness until you have to put your foot down, usually in the middle of a big mess they've created. You will always be the villain, but keep the story small and it'll soon be replaced by lamenting their next "useless" contractors.
HTTPS doesn't hide what computers contacts other computers. I doubt NSA cares that much about the actual content of the communication. By just checking the metadata they can see if someone is communicating with someone on their naughty-list and add them to it. It doesn't matter if you just asked what time it was. If you are talking with a terrorist you are considered to be a terrorist.
The metadata NSA is after is not your computer contacting to facebook.com, it's Alice sending a Facebook message to Bob. They very much want to unwrap HTTPS to get to their level of metadata. And I'm pretty sure they slurped up the content too, because we're the NSA and the rules don't apply to us.
You must be smoking some strong weed if you believe that the average Joe even grasps the concept of CA. Most of them don't even understand what connection encryption is.
You don't need random users, just traffic appearing like it so they don't MITM everyone but your test connection. Try it from home or your private cell phone. Ask a friend or family member to check. Use a public WiFi spot or go to a library. Use a proxy or VPN. Ask some privacy watchdog organization for volunteers. If any of them get the wrong certificate it's happening. You're not trying to find targeted attacks, you just want to know if they have a giant dragnet doing it to everyone. Did you see the Snowden movie? If they're not doing doing it until they have a particular reason to, that's still a huge win for privacy.
And on topic: I don't know much about cybersecurity but I would like to make sure the emails I send can not be read easily by people to whom my emails are not addressed. How can I go about that?
All you have is an address. To make an analogy to physical mail there's some security in sending letters instead of postcards but really most is in the postal system and the security of the recipient's mailbox which is out of your control. Not much you can do if I want it on my web mail, it's going to semi-permanently live on someone else's server in plaintext. If you want more security than that you need your communication partner to work with you, even if it's so low tech that you call them up and say the password for the encrypted attachment is luggage12345. If they don't want to play ball, no game.
If your security concerns resonate well with the recipient and all you want is security and not anonymity in a convenient package I'd suggest you both forget email and install Signal. It's mainstream, open source, you need a phone (cell phone, Google Voice, VoIP or landline) to register but you can install a desktop app in Chrome/Chromium after that and gives you easy encrypted text and voice messages. There's more to it if you're really concerned about social engineering, man-in-the-middle attacks, malware-infected phones/computers, metadata analysis etc. but it's overkill for you.
That works for everyone where you'd have each other's phone numbers. It's not yet perfect for asymmetric, anonymous or covert relationships like whistleblowers, forming an underground organization, operating in a non-democratic country where using encryption tools is in itself outlawed or dangerous or having a secret identity like being a closeted homosexual, mostly because you're tied to a phone number that binds it all together and burner phones are inconvenient and not available in all parts of the world and it depends on a server in the middle that's trivial to block.
It depends upon how poor of a programmer you were previously.
While perhaps not so blunt, that sort of mirrors my thinking. It has to be a really fucked up language to make you worse then before, sure you pick up bad habits but if you're willing to learn you're willing to unlearn. If you're not you're kinda fucked either way. It's another question entirely if it's an efficient way, like could you learn functional or object-oriented programming or some design pattern faster by another language. I'm sure every language has something similar to for example the singleton pattern, like what do I do if I only want one instance with a global state. Most of the time it's simply a question of the short road or the long road.
It's there != we can mine it with reasonable effort. Take for example asteroid mining, how long have we heard about that? I think the biggest limitation is that if you depend on a water deposit you have to land pretty much on top of it. Mars' circumference is 21344 km, you will not be travelling geographically significant distances with it. Maybe we'd rather be near the equator for higher temperatures? Down a crater for denser atmosphere? Near resources for fuel production?
I'm thinking we need an airtight dome and an almost completely closed system anyway, where does the water go? Does it end up in waste products we can't process? Escape when they go outside in space suits? If it's the former, it's a reason to improve our reclamation technology. If it's the latter, it's a reason to improve robot technology. Or that we ride around in vehicles that have some other form of heat exchange that doesn't let water vapor escape. It's the same as with soil -> plants -> food -> feces -> soil, the basic elements aren't going anywhere.
It will probably be a long time before truck drivers are completely replaced - take a look at railroads, for example. It would be technically possible to automate railroads right now, but the rail companies haven't done so; having a person onboard is very useful for legal liability, security, and fixing all the minor, odd issues that come up, and so on. I guess that we will probably end up with "freight stewards" in trucks, where the computer does most of the driving, but the steward takes over for odd cases, and gets out and fixes minor issues to keep the truck on the road, provide physical security to the freight, and help with loading/unloading at the end points.
That sounds very inefficient. I'm thinking it will go in three directions: 1) Remote operation, we do it with drones so why not trucks? If each truck needs help maybe 1% of the time one operator can support a whole fleet. 2) Location-based staff that help trucks in their area, like a tow truck light that either work at a depot or loading/unloading area or are on call. 3) Use armored cars, stronger locks, dye packs if forced entry and have the car report in as often as possible. Miss a checkpoint, alarm goes.
Pretty sure the moment trucks drive themselves the whole "one truck, one man" concept will go out the window pretty quick. That said I think we're still some years away from commercially available self-driving cars.
I was talking about this with my brother and the consensus between us was that Microsoft couldn't make Windows phones cool to teenagers. It's funny, but it seems like the teenage demographic decides what phones are going to succeed, even if they're not the ones making the final buying decision (or even the biggest buying demographic).
The main thing Windows Phone was is late, iPhone launched in 2007 and Android in 2008 so by the time the stylus-oriented Windows Mobile was replaced by the touch-oriented Windows Phone in 2010 they were fighting a rather established user base with more polished apps. And there were so many Android manufacturers trying to find niches that they saturated the non-iPhone market, leading to intense competition where they often did not make any money at all. Microsoft didn't want to chase the bargain bin market, but with smartphones spreading to the less affluent parts of the world Android's volume was booming so in terms of market share it all went backwards. And at the top Apple was releasing some pretty killer products.
On the desktop it's businesses and Office that keep Windows in the driver's seat, people use it because they have to know it for work anyway. That's what I thought would be Microsoft's angle, to be a "mainstream Blackberry" that integrated really well with a corporate network so that employers would prefer Windows Phone and employees tolerate it. I never even saw them try, sure it was a decent phone but it could just as easily have come from any other phone company. You didn't really get anything from going with an all-Microsoft solution.
The inevitable outcome is just that the list of magnet links will also become distributed much like the DNS system.
Doubtful. At some point somebody has to control the index so it doesn't get spammed by bots, you want search/nfo/preview/vote/report/comment features. What I really would like to see though - despite the potential for abuse - is something like an torrent that can be updated. Say you download episode 1x01 of a show, if you "subscribe" to updates the creator can replace it with a 1x01-1x02 torrent, then a 1x01-1x03 torrent and so on without the need to chase down each update. It would probably help seeding and reduce the number of torrents floating around as "megapacks" could be continuously revised and you just pick the bits you want.
I know many people here will argue that these things don't matter. Yeah, a lot of the nuances are mostly aesthetic. But is there a reason that text can't (or shouldn't?) be pretty as well as legible? Or should we all just use black Times New Roman text on a white background with default spacing and formatting everywhere?
Personally I think it could be a user preference, one of the great advantages of electronic text is that it doesn't have to be one size fits all.
Fraud obviates consent. Or, to put it another way, if consent is obtained fraudulently, the consent is not legally effective. Accordingly, there was no legally effective consent to sex.
So if you hire a prostitute who is stupid enough to not get paid up front and you afterwards can't pay it's retroactively rape? And she's un-raped when you visit an ATM? That's absurd. I can understand "rape by deception" if it's a case of fraudulent identity like you're the twin brother of her boyfriend or you slip into the boyfriend's Halloween costume or there's blindfolds involved so you end up having voluntary sex with someone else than you thought and it is not simply a case of mistaken identity - if there's another guy with the same costume at the party and he thinks you invited him to a quickie in the bathroom that's your own damn fault - but a deliberate attempt to impersonate someone else. Everything else would be a total butchering of the meaning of rape.
What's the problem? Music labels sticking their heads in the sand and ignoring changes to the consumer landscape. They were so used to dictating terms that they thought they would always get away with it.
It's the role of consumers to want, we might want a super-sports car for $10k. It is the car manufacturers that "dictate" what cars are actually available, we vote with our wallet from the available choices. There's nothing that says the market should do what the consumer asks if there's no vendor willing to provide. "Give us what we want or we'll rob you" isn't ordinary market capitalism. Okay, so copyright infringement isn't stealing but we pretty much blackmailed them into changing. I guess you can argue that two wrongs make a right, a dysfunctional market was corrected by extra-legal means. It's not really how a producer-consumer relationship is supposed to work though.
computing, music, whatever was better back in the day.
No, it wasn't better. It was much, much worse. It was so rudimentary you could actually start at:
10 PRINT "Hello World" 20 GOTO 10
There's no doubt that a chain saw is far superior to a hand saw. But if I was interested in saw-making and how saws work it'd be an awfully lot easier to build a hand saw from scratch, all the way down to forging the blade, fitting the handle and giving it teeth. In fact it's often an inverse relationship between how hard it is to make and how hard it is to use, like an automatic gearbox is more complex than a manual gearbox. As progress means that we build more and more advanced and complex solutions, the more it is out of reach for the hobbyist. I could almost make something similar to commercial games on the C64 because many of them were actually written by one man in a garage. Today you look at $100 million dollar titles and realize that even if you did this professionally you'd be one little cog in a very big wheel.
It's in the nature of advanced civilization, we're all doing a very small part. I depend on other people to produce the food I eat, the clothes I wear, the hot and cold running water, the electricity, the car and the roads etc. and all I do really is program computers and trade for everything else. That means I know a lot about that and very little about the rest. Or I could train for the post-apocalyptic society were I have to survive using whatever crude means I can pull off on my own, but life is short. I think I'll just take my chances and if shit hits the fan contribute to the rapid de-population back to an agrarian society.
I'm curious what exactly you'd like to run at 20 Ghz through the general purpose CPU registers that can't be done better/faster with extensions using specialized hardware.
Nothing, obviously. I'll just submit my DFS4ME (do funky shit for me) instruction to Intel and I'm sure they'll put it in the next stepping or create a special batch just for me. I can even pay $50 extra, though I need it next week. I'll also reverse engineer and patch that proprietary binary I got to use the new instruction, that totally won't be any work or void any support. Or I could buy that 20 GHz machine and have everything magically work much, much faster. Nah, I'll just do the first one.
I mean, seriously? Carrie Fisher- the real-life human being- has died. I'm assuming the people saying this are more into Star Wars than I am, and I'd have thought they'd at least feel something for the passing of Carrie Fisher as an actual human being in her own right rather than simply the means to reproduce Leia.
Do you know Carrie Fisher? I know I don't... nor the other 55 million that died this year, with a few exceptions. The only reason we know about her is as Leia. The only reason we care more than the other people who die every day is Leia. If Leia lives on through CGI, is that Carrie? Absolutely not to anyone who knew her. But that's not most people. I'd like to say she'd not be real. But princess Leia was never real, she was a character. If we can keep up the illusion of Leia through CGI, I'm all for it.
It won't bring Carrie back, nothing will. But it could finish her work beyond death, like say Brandon Sanderson finished Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series. It might not have been every word as he wanted it, but it was in his spirit. If they do CGI Leia it might not be exactly like Carrie would have played it, but it would be in her spirit. If they don't do that, I hope they write her out of the sequels altogether. I know some shows have tried swapping the actor and keeping the character, it never ends well.
But then to fix the web required a third-party browser to already exist that adhered to standards to gain marketshare, which came in the form of mobile Safari on the iPhone.
Stop licking Steve Jobs' butt, he did enough without making shit up. Peak IE was around 2004 with 95% market share. In mid-2007 when the first generation iPhone launched it was already down to around 80%, that is non-IE share had quadrupled and the monopoly was cracking all over. The market for $399+ smartphones was nothing compared to the many hundreds of millions of computers in use, the first sign of mobile browsing having any more than a token presence was in 2010 (went from 1.3% to 4.1% that year, according to StatCounter) when IE was down to 60%. The iPhone had absolutely nothing to do with the fall of IE.
The entire purpose of a marriage is to be a legal agreement between a couple and the rest of their society. It provides legal rights to the couple as a whole, and to each individual member of the couple. Other aspects of marriage such as love, religious meaning, etc are what society adds on as it sees fit, but the core of marriage is its legal meaning.
Marriage started as a "hands off my wife" thing, it conveyed no particular legal rights only moral rights. For early Christians the man's wow was to "love, cherish and worship" and the woman's wow to "love, cherish and obey". There's a reason the bride was passed from her father to her husband, it was passing the stewardship. Then he'd pop her cherry on the wedding night as the first and only man for life. That was the core of marriage, entirely unrelated to the state. If that offends remember this is from a time long before slavery was abolished, women were much closer to property than they were today. It wasn't until the 13th century that recognition by a priest or any other formal authority was required.
Today we've stripped away most everything else until it's only the legal institution left. She's not being given away as dad's property to be her husband's property. She doesn't have to be a she and he doesn't have to be a he, for that matter. I suppose there's still abstinent brides but there won't be a scandal if she's not a virgin or gets divorced or remarries, it's "until death do us part or we change our minds". And we don't deal with adultery like good Christians anymore "If a man commits adultery with the wife of his neighbor, both the adulterer and the adulteress shall surely be put to death.", sleeping around is now a civil matter. A woman can be raped inside and outside a marriage. Really it's down to a few boring bits about tax and inheritance. But it's not because it was the core, we're stripped away that so it's nothing more than a legal shell. Which is why so many live marriaged-ish but not actually married.
I tend to go out exploring similar artists or searching for new music using Spotify and often end up at brilliant artists with just a few dozen followers. A flat rate makes it so the artists can compete on the product, not the marketing.
Not really, there's an awful lot of power in deciding what songs are in the playlists they promote and what they put in your discover feed. For every one of you there's probably a hundred using it as a quasi-radio streaming mainstream artists over and over again. I did it this Christmas, just tuned into some pre-made playlist and that was what was playing. Which means all the classics got another stream or five, regardless if I like every particular one. I'm not going to be annoyed enough to get up and switch. I'm not going to really miss any particular song. I just got something "good enough" with minimum effort and Spotify is in control of who benefits from all the potential Christmas songs that fit the bill. The A-list artists rarely complain because they get so many "free" streams from people who didn't pick their song in particular, they're just included everywhere. They drown out the exceptions to the point that your odd streaming paid them $0.005 while Justin Bieber got a billion * $0.005.
Spotify does not have as a goal to diversify the music industry. If keeping the big artists big keeps the big labels happy and the business flowing that's what they'll do. They know it's the big name artists that have the power and financial backing to walk out on them. They know everyone else is a bit damned if you do and damned if you don't, they need Spotify more than Spotify needs them. In fact, I think for quite a few of my music loving friends if you're not on Spotify you pretty much don't exist. That's not exactly a good position to bargain from.
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Of course the "top extreme" of anything will always be ridiculously poor value for money. A i7-2600k @ 3.4GHz has a Passmark score of 8488 for $317 at 95W released Q1 2011, correcting for inflation it's pretty much same price, same power, +50% performance increase in six years or about 7% annually. That's ten years to double performance, the next generation will have eight times the performance in 30 years. Granted if it was anything other than computers it wouldn't be that bad, but if you compare the 2010s to any other decade since they discovered the transistor in the 1950s it's like hitting a brick wall. The real question is whether it's just because AMD quit or if Intel really has run out of tricks.
For me, docking stations and big monitors allow me to use my laptop in a reasonably comfortable work environment. But, there are still use cases for desktop PCs, especially those that aren't shoved into the back of an all-in-one monitor. You're not going to let a call center employee in a regulated, locked down environment pull out his iPad or laptop to work, for example.
No, but neither is he likely to use a proper desktop, Thin clients and virtualization are so much easier to deal with if you consider fixed locations and centralized control to be a feature. Sure there are those with particular workstation or input/output device needs but not the average corporate desktop. If it wasn't for gaming I think the desktop would be relegated to a small, small niche.
Ride sharing (zip cars, and eventually automated vehicles) will be the future, but people do need to be aware in such a future, people will most likely not "own" cars any longer. But for this to work, they can only be a last leg. Ride shares and self driving cars will NOT solve the transportation gridlock problem. Cars simply do not have the capacity of real public transit:
I think for long or cost sensitive rides most people would be willing to swap vehicles, like you do with bus/tram/subway lines in public transport or how you could combine that and taxis today. The big difference is that SDCs barely cost money when they're not moving. Taxi companies set big minimums because the driver has to make a decent wage per hour worked, idle time and unpaid overhead costs tons of money. And once you're out working, you don't turn on and off like a faucet. Sure it would mean more money tied up in the SDC fleet causing capital costs but if you put them in rotation so they all run a lot of miles the operational costs should be almost identical. So I see a lot of potential in hybrid solutions where you merge/split/shuffle rides on demand. The two main reasons people don't use public transport is that it's not a door-to-door ride and that you can spend a lot of time waiting.
I think SDC industry can do a lot not just on the former but also on the latter by "insuring" the passenger like for example that you're stuck in heavy traffic and can't catch the bus or the bus is severely delayed they make it a taxi ride. If they can deliver you 95% of the time and you get a "free" taxi ride 5% of the time that might be a lot more appealing than today where you're often screwed when that happens. Of course it won't protect you from all traffic chaos, but nothing is more frustrating sitting the on the bus steaming known that if only you'd taken the car you'd already be there long ago.
Back before development was professionalized, was Christmas a period of rapid change as kernel hackers finally had time off work to really dig into Linux?
I doubt it. Many would be students and for Christmas they are busy with family things. The days it's soggy, windy and overall shitty to be out in late autumn or early spring long before exams would probably be the bulk of it.
Can someone please explain how FreeSync2 has any influence at all on any of that?
FreeSync 2 comes with a developer API that will let developers access a HDR pipeline on non-HDR operating systems (that's the extended gamut and brightness bit) while skipping the HDR display's layer of tone mapping (that's the lower latency). If the developers don't do anything or you already do HDR, you only get the latter. And they can do that because FreeSync 2 monitors tell the GPU what HDR capabilities they have so the GPU can deliver a custom tailored output and the monitor display it unprocessed.
I think that for playing alone, I could now be reasonably content with what's on offer now. There are enough games on Windows that I don't get around to playing them all, so basically it'd just narrow the field. But I have friends and we play games like GTA V and Overwatch and I don't want to be left out. Dual booting is extremely annoying. Buying two high end graphics cards is out. So as much as my inner nerd wants to say yes, it's still no. I might put in my previous graphics card and play lighter titles though, it's on the substitute bench while before it was up in the stands selling hot dogs. And Apple - still the second biggest graphics market - had to go off and do their own thing with Metal instead of Vulkan so there'll be no joint force against DirectX. I'm hoping things will change before Win7 goes out of support, but I'm not optimistic.
You keep insulting me, the customer. I will not be doing business with you and will slander your name.
Dickhead clients will slander you anyway because they use up all your reasonableness until you have to put your foot down, usually in the middle of a big mess they've created. You will always be the villain, but keep the story small and it'll soon be replaced by lamenting their next "useless" contractors.
HTTPS doesn't hide what computers contacts other computers. I doubt NSA cares that much about the actual content of the communication. By just checking the metadata they can see if someone is communicating with someone on their naughty-list and add them to it. It doesn't matter if you just asked what time it was. If you are talking with a terrorist you are considered to be a terrorist.
The metadata NSA is after is not your computer contacting to facebook.com, it's Alice sending a Facebook message to Bob. They very much want to unwrap HTTPS to get to their level of metadata. And I'm pretty sure they slurped up the content too, because we're the NSA and the rules don't apply to us.
You must be smoking some strong weed if you believe that the average Joe even grasps the concept of CA. Most of them don't even understand what connection encryption is.
You don't need random users, just traffic appearing like it so they don't MITM everyone but your test connection. Try it from home or your private cell phone. Ask a friend or family member to check. Use a public WiFi spot or go to a library. Use a proxy or VPN. Ask some privacy watchdog organization for volunteers. If any of them get the wrong certificate it's happening. You're not trying to find targeted attacks, you just want to know if they have a giant dragnet doing it to everyone. Did you see the Snowden movie? If they're not doing doing it until they have a particular reason to, that's still a huge win for privacy.
And on topic: I don't know much about cybersecurity but I would like to make sure the emails I send can not be read easily by people to whom my emails are not addressed. How can I go about that?
All you have is an address. To make an analogy to physical mail there's some security in sending letters instead of postcards but really most is in the postal system and the security of the recipient's mailbox which is out of your control. Not much you can do if I want it on my web mail, it's going to semi-permanently live on someone else's server in plaintext. If you want more security than that you need your communication partner to work with you, even if it's so low tech that you call them up and say the password for the encrypted attachment is luggage12345. If they don't want to play ball, no game.
If your security concerns resonate well with the recipient and all you want is security and not anonymity in a convenient package I'd suggest you both forget email and install Signal. It's mainstream, open source, you need a phone (cell phone, Google Voice, VoIP or landline) to register but you can install a desktop app in Chrome/Chromium after that and gives you easy encrypted text and voice messages. There's more to it if you're really concerned about social engineering, man-in-the-middle attacks, malware-infected phones/computers, metadata analysis etc. but it's overkill for you.
That works for everyone where you'd have each other's phone numbers. It's not yet perfect for asymmetric, anonymous or covert relationships like whistleblowers, forming an underground organization, operating in a non-democratic country where using encryption tools is in itself outlawed or dangerous or having a secret identity like being a closeted homosexual, mostly because you're tied to a phone number that binds it all together and burner phones are inconvenient and not available in all parts of the world and it depends on a server in the middle that's trivial to block.
It depends upon how poor of a programmer you were previously.
While perhaps not so blunt, that sort of mirrors my thinking. It has to be a really fucked up language to make you worse then before, sure you pick up bad habits but if you're willing to learn you're willing to unlearn. If you're not you're kinda fucked either way. It's another question entirely if it's an efficient way, like could you learn functional or object-oriented programming or some design pattern faster by another language. I'm sure every language has something similar to for example the singleton pattern, like what do I do if I only want one instance with a global state. Most of the time it's simply a question of the short road or the long road.
It's there != we can mine it with reasonable effort. Take for example asteroid mining, how long have we heard about that? I think the biggest limitation is that if you depend on a water deposit you have to land pretty much on top of it. Mars' circumference is 21344 km, you will not be travelling geographically significant distances with it. Maybe we'd rather be near the equator for higher temperatures? Down a crater for denser atmosphere? Near resources for fuel production?
I'm thinking we need an airtight dome and an almost completely closed system anyway, where does the water go? Does it end up in waste products we can't process? Escape when they go outside in space suits? If it's the former, it's a reason to improve our reclamation technology. If it's the latter, it's a reason to improve robot technology. Or that we ride around in vehicles that have some other form of heat exchange that doesn't let water vapor escape. It's the same as with soil -> plants -> food -> feces -> soil, the basic elements aren't going anywhere.
It will probably be a long time before truck drivers are completely replaced - take a look at railroads, for example. It would be technically possible to automate railroads right now, but the rail companies haven't done so; having a person onboard is very useful for legal liability, security, and fixing all the minor, odd issues that come up, and so on. I guess that we will probably end up with "freight stewards" in trucks, where the computer does most of the driving, but the steward takes over for odd cases, and gets out and fixes minor issues to keep the truck on the road, provide physical security to the freight, and help with loading/unloading at the end points.
That sounds very inefficient. I'm thinking it will go in three directions:
1) Remote operation, we do it with drones so why not trucks? If each truck needs help maybe 1% of the time one operator can support a whole fleet.
2) Location-based staff that help trucks in their area, like a tow truck light that either work at a depot or loading/unloading area or are on call.
3) Use armored cars, stronger locks, dye packs if forced entry and have the car report in as often as possible. Miss a checkpoint, alarm goes.
Pretty sure the moment trucks drive themselves the whole "one truck, one man" concept will go out the window pretty quick. That said I think we're still some years away from commercially available self-driving cars.
I was talking about this with my brother and the consensus between us was that Microsoft couldn't make Windows phones cool to teenagers. It's funny, but it seems like the teenage demographic decides what phones are going to succeed, even if they're not the ones making the final buying decision (or even the biggest buying demographic).
The main thing Windows Phone was is late, iPhone launched in 2007 and Android in 2008 so by the time the stylus-oriented Windows Mobile was replaced by the touch-oriented Windows Phone in 2010 they were fighting a rather established user base with more polished apps. And there were so many Android manufacturers trying to find niches that they saturated the non-iPhone market, leading to intense competition where they often did not make any money at all. Microsoft didn't want to chase the bargain bin market, but with smartphones spreading to the less affluent parts of the world Android's volume was booming so in terms of market share it all went backwards. And at the top Apple was releasing some pretty killer products.
On the desktop it's businesses and Office that keep Windows in the driver's seat, people use it because they have to know it for work anyway. That's what I thought would be Microsoft's angle, to be a "mainstream Blackberry" that integrated really well with a corporate network so that employers would prefer Windows Phone and employees tolerate it. I never even saw them try, sure it was a decent phone but it could just as easily have come from any other phone company. You didn't really get anything from going with an all-Microsoft solution.
The inevitable outcome is just that the list of magnet links will also become distributed much like the DNS system.
Doubtful. At some point somebody has to control the index so it doesn't get spammed by bots, you want search/nfo/preview/vote/report/comment features. What I really would like to see though - despite the potential for abuse - is something like an torrent that can be updated. Say you download episode 1x01 of a show, if you "subscribe" to updates the creator can replace it with a 1x01-1x02 torrent, then a 1x01-1x03 torrent and so on without the need to chase down each update. It would probably help seeding and reduce the number of torrents floating around as "megapacks" could be continuously revised and you just pick the bits you want.
I know many people here will argue that these things don't matter. Yeah, a lot of the nuances are mostly aesthetic. But is there a reason that text can't (or shouldn't?) be pretty as well as legible? Or should we all just use black Times New Roman text on a white background with default spacing and formatting everywhere?
Personally I think it could be a user preference, one of the great advantages of electronic text is that it doesn't have to be one size fits all.
Fraud obviates consent. Or, to put it another way, if consent is obtained fraudulently, the consent is not legally effective. Accordingly, there was no legally effective consent to sex.
So if you hire a prostitute who is stupid enough to not get paid up front and you afterwards can't pay it's retroactively rape? And she's un-raped when you visit an ATM? That's absurd. I can understand "rape by deception" if it's a case of fraudulent identity like you're the twin brother of her boyfriend or you slip into the boyfriend's Halloween costume or there's blindfolds involved so you end up having voluntary sex with someone else than you thought and it is not simply a case of mistaken identity - if there's another guy with the same costume at the party and he thinks you invited him to a quickie in the bathroom that's your own damn fault - but a deliberate attempt to impersonate someone else. Everything else would be a total butchering of the meaning of rape.
What's the problem? Music labels sticking their heads in the sand and ignoring changes to the consumer landscape. They were so used to dictating terms that they thought they would always get away with it.
It's the role of consumers to want, we might want a super-sports car for $10k. It is the car manufacturers that "dictate" what cars are actually available, we vote with our wallet from the available choices. There's nothing that says the market should do what the consumer asks if there's no vendor willing to provide. "Give us what we want or we'll rob you" isn't ordinary market capitalism. Okay, so copyright infringement isn't stealing but we pretty much blackmailed them into changing. I guess you can argue that two wrongs make a right, a dysfunctional market was corrected by extra-legal means. It's not really how a producer-consumer relationship is supposed to work though.
computing, music, whatever was better back in the day.
No, it wasn't better. It was much, much worse. It was so rudimentary you could actually start at:
10 PRINT "Hello World"
20 GOTO 10
There's no doubt that a chain saw is far superior to a hand saw. But if I was interested in saw-making and how saws work it'd be an awfully lot easier to build a hand saw from scratch, all the way down to forging the blade, fitting the handle and giving it teeth. In fact it's often an inverse relationship between how hard it is to make and how hard it is to use, like an automatic gearbox is more complex than a manual gearbox. As progress means that we build more and more advanced and complex solutions, the more it is out of reach for the hobbyist. I could almost make something similar to commercial games on the C64 because many of them were actually written by one man in a garage. Today you look at $100 million dollar titles and realize that even if you did this professionally you'd be one little cog in a very big wheel.
It's in the nature of advanced civilization, we're all doing a very small part. I depend on other people to produce the food I eat, the clothes I wear, the hot and cold running water, the electricity, the car and the roads etc. and all I do really is program computers and trade for everything else. That means I know a lot about that and very little about the rest. Or I could train for the post-apocalyptic society were I have to survive using whatever crude means I can pull off on my own, but life is short. I think I'll just take my chances and if shit hits the fan contribute to the rapid de-population back to an agrarian society.
I'm curious what exactly you'd like to run at 20 Ghz through the general purpose CPU registers that can't be done better/faster with extensions using specialized hardware.
Nothing, obviously. I'll just submit my DFS4ME (do funky shit for me) instruction to Intel and I'm sure they'll put it in the next stepping or create a special batch just for me. I can even pay $50 extra, though I need it next week. I'll also reverse engineer and patch that proprietary binary I got to use the new instruction, that totally won't be any work or void any support. Or I could buy that 20 GHz machine and have everything magically work much, much faster. Nah, I'll just do the first one.
I mean, seriously? Carrie Fisher- the real-life human being- has died. I'm assuming the people saying this are more into Star Wars than I am, and I'd have thought they'd at least feel something for the passing of Carrie Fisher as an actual human being in her own right rather than simply the means to reproduce Leia.
Do you know Carrie Fisher? I know I don't... nor the other 55 million that died this year, with a few exceptions. The only reason we know about her is as Leia. The only reason we care more than the other people who die every day is Leia. If Leia lives on through CGI, is that Carrie? Absolutely not to anyone who knew her. But that's not most people. I'd like to say she'd not be real. But princess Leia was never real, she was a character. If we can keep up the illusion of Leia through CGI, I'm all for it.
It won't bring Carrie back, nothing will. But it could finish her work beyond death, like say Brandon Sanderson finished Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series. It might not have been every word as he wanted it, but it was in his spirit. If they do CGI Leia it might not be exactly like Carrie would have played it, but it would be in her spirit. If they don't do that, I hope they write her out of the sequels altogether. I know some shows have tried swapping the actor and keeping the character, it never ends well.
So until the U.S. Congress figures out how to crack down on telcos taking rural Internet subsidies and pocketing them
Or you know, let people do the job themselves.
But then to fix the web required a third-party browser to already exist that adhered to standards to gain marketshare, which came in the form of mobile Safari on the iPhone.
Stop licking Steve Jobs' butt, he did enough without making shit up. Peak IE was around 2004 with 95% market share. In mid-2007 when the first generation iPhone launched it was already down to around 80%, that is non-IE share had quadrupled and the monopoly was cracking all over. The market for $399+ smartphones was nothing compared to the many hundreds of millions of computers in use, the first sign of mobile browsing having any more than a token presence was in 2010 (went from 1.3% to 4.1% that year, according to StatCounter) when IE was down to 60%. The iPhone had absolutely nothing to do with the fall of IE.
The entire purpose of a marriage is to be a legal agreement between a couple and the rest of their society. It provides legal rights to the couple as a whole, and to each individual member of the couple. Other aspects of marriage such as love, religious meaning, etc are what society adds on as it sees fit, but the core of marriage is its legal meaning.
Marriage started as a "hands off my wife" thing, it conveyed no particular legal rights only moral rights. For early Christians the man's wow was to "love, cherish and worship" and the woman's wow to "love, cherish and obey". There's a reason the bride was passed from her father to her husband, it was passing the stewardship. Then he'd pop her cherry on the wedding night as the first and only man for life. That was the core of marriage, entirely unrelated to the state. If that offends remember this is from a time long before slavery was abolished, women were much closer to property than they were today. It wasn't until the 13th century that recognition by a priest or any other formal authority was required.
Today we've stripped away most everything else until it's only the legal institution left. She's not being given away as dad's property to be her husband's property. She doesn't have to be a she and he doesn't have to be a he, for that matter. I suppose there's still abstinent brides but there won't be a scandal if she's not a virgin or gets divorced or remarries, it's "until death do us part or we change our minds". And we don't deal with adultery like good Christians anymore "If a man commits adultery with the wife of his neighbor, both the adulterer and the adulteress shall surely be put to death.", sleeping around is now a civil matter. A woman can be raped inside and outside a marriage. Really it's down to a few boring bits about tax and inheritance. But it's not because it was the core, we're stripped away that so it's nothing more than a legal shell. Which is why so many live marriaged-ish but not actually married.
I tend to go out exploring similar artists or searching for new music using Spotify and often end up at brilliant artists with just a few dozen followers. A flat rate makes it so the artists can compete on the product, not the marketing.
Not really, there's an awful lot of power in deciding what songs are in the playlists they promote and what they put in your discover feed. For every one of you there's probably a hundred using it as a quasi-radio streaming mainstream artists over and over again. I did it this Christmas, just tuned into some pre-made playlist and that was what was playing. Which means all the classics got another stream or five, regardless if I like every particular one. I'm not going to be annoyed enough to get up and switch. I'm not going to really miss any particular song. I just got something "good enough" with minimum effort and Spotify is in control of who benefits from all the potential Christmas songs that fit the bill. The A-list artists rarely complain because they get so many "free" streams from people who didn't pick their song in particular, they're just included everywhere. They drown out the exceptions to the point that your odd streaming paid them $0.005 while Justin Bieber got a billion * $0.005.
Spotify does not have as a goal to diversify the music industry. If keeping the big artists big keeps the big labels happy and the business flowing that's what they'll do. They know it's the big name artists that have the power and financial backing to walk out on them. They know everyone else is a bit damned if you do and damned if you don't, they need Spotify more than Spotify needs them. In fact, I think for quite a few of my music loving friends if you're not on Spotify you pretty much don't exist. That's not exactly a good position to bargain from.