Employment contracts specify a minimum notice period. While one week is typical for shelf-stacker jobs, an administrator position usually specifies four weeks or 'a week, plus a week for each year in employment here' for exactly this reason.
It's basically harmless. Doesn't use significant resources.
Doesn't do you any good though either: Yandex is a Russian search engine. The users speak Russian, so not many are going to be visiting an english-language site.
I don't know what the civil courts are like, but the criminal courts are famous for their >99% conviction rate. They really do exist purely to rubber-stamp arrests. The police are often nice enough to invite visitors to pay a 'reinvestigation fee' to re-examine the case before charging though - if the bribe is to their satisfaction, the charges are dropped.
I would assume the civil courts are similar rubber-stamps for various government agencies: Say something insulting to Putin, and you can expect someone to go over your site looking for a quote you've repeated without permission to use as a pretext to block the site.
They just directed the decision back to the publishers - it's up to them now if they will require games use an always-on connection, or lock each purchase to a specific console or steam account to prevent resale. Microsoft provides support for such restrictions, but doesn't require they be used.
That's going to make writing emulators much easier. Might even be able to do it using hardware-aided virtualisation, nice and fast, and half the code you'd need is already open-source for PC virtualisation.
Orchid growers have similar problems. Some varieties of orchids are very fussy plants - growing them reliably can require elaborate hydroponics setups, warm air ventilation and intense artificial daylight. Being the hardest to grow, these are also the most valuable due to their rarity. The equipment is exactly the same as that used for intensive cannabis production, so there have been many incients of orchid growers being raided by police - they determine the address has purchased hydroponics and grow-lamps, notice a suspiciously hot shed, and conclude it is a secret pot farm. Suppliers of the equipment are also placed under routine monitoring so police can get a list of customers to investigate.
It's to stop people from clogging the courts in protest. It'd be really annoying if the government passed a law of slightly dubious validity and a thousand activists decided to file suit against it. With so many cases going on at once, it's inevitable courts would issue conflicting orders. While such a process could be used to stop unconstitutional laws, it could also be used to stall laws that are perfectly valid but have a dedicated opposition.
I've seen typical users. They get to websites by just typing in the name of the site, and rely on the browser to handle it - which is fine, because all the popular browsers interpret a lone word in the address bar as a search term and go to the default search engine. So it's actually quite common for someone using IE to simply enter 'google' into the bar - and IE will then search this on the default search engine, which is Bing. The user then clicks the top result, ends up at google, and gives their real search.
There was an incident years ago when facebook briefly fell to the #2 slot in the results for 'facebook.' Thus a lot of 'enter name, click top link' people ended up at the wrong site.
Then when they come back with a warrant, they'll make sure to sledgehammer your walls apart, smash your appliances an tear your floorboards up. Just in case you have anything hidden inside. They'll sieze all your computers too as evidence so they can go missing during processing.
The quality and trustworthyness of police in the US varies greatly. Some departments are the picture of politeness and will strive to protect the innocent, while others are vindictive thugs who have a policy of destroying anyone who dares stand against them. It just depends where you live.
Someone probably just decided that a URL is metadata, and the page returned is the data. Google searches put the URL in the address, thus the search can be considered metadata.
If the program is only permitted to collect metadata, then it's not unreasonable to conclude someone may define the term in the broadest possible sense.
The latest rumors, based on some recently released but heavily redacted documents, is that the NSA uses a 'three hop' system. Anyone suspected of terrorism is monitored, even if a US citizen, but the warrant used also includes any of their contacts, and any of their contacts, and any of their contacts. So with just a handful of suspected terrorists, the entire US population is suspect-by-association.
Because most people have a sense of 'justice' that is little more than a polite cover for the urge to see criminals tortured. They'll support just about any abuse of police power, so long as it isn't directed at them.
Microsoft is pushing for subscription services because they realised their greatest competitor is themselves from five years ago. Look how long it took to get people off of XP. They reached the point where their software was 'good enough' that no-one has a compelling reason to upgrade to a new version, and the loss of a perpetual upgrade cycle ruins the whole business model.
It also helped that Android had a major corporation behind it, and a lot of manufacturers committed. Companies able to lean on hardware developers and demand that they release decent-quality drivers.
Most of the problem people have with installing linux distros, just as has always been the case, stems from hardware compatibility issues. You install the distro, then find that your sound card isn't supported, or that the video card is but the drivers are terribly buggy, or that the UEFI boot process on the firmware was only properly tested booting Windows and has compatibility issues with anything else. And woe betide you if you want to get your printer working. Linux is rare enough on the desktop that there is just no economic reason for hardware manufacturers to invest the resources into linux support, and this will remain the case until a major OEM makes a serious commitment and has the purchasing power to make it happen. Just as happened for servers already.
Tablets aren't really used for working on. That's what ultrabooks are for. Tablets are great content consumption devices: Video, books, a little web browsing. But how many people use them for serious work?
Eventually, yes. It's screwing up the climate, the extraction process is environmentally damaging, and even if it can be produced domestically it'll still run out given enough time.
But it's also a dense, reliable and very cheap energy source. The only alternatives are either far more expensive or less practical. So it would take many decades to transition away from oil even if the political will existed. Which it doesn't.
Nixon would probably get away with it these days. He'd just claim the burglers were conducting an anti-terrorism investigation and he had no personal knowledge of it.
Actually, he *did* get away with it. His career was knocked back, but all the blame and the charges fell upon his underlings. Nixon himself resigned, then was granted an unconditional pardon - a very broad one - by his successor. Ford was a fellow Republican, and knew that if Nixon were prosecuted it would bring the entire party into disrepute.
So the lesson? If you're president, and you abuse your power to try to spy upon your political opponents and disrupt their election campaign, you will be granted immunity and retire to a life of casual wealth.
Because raytracing does produce near-reality quality. It solves the shadow/lighting problem - you simply treat diffuse light sources as a very large number of point light sources. All those wonderfully-perfect CGI films and special effects are produced using raytracing... at an hour a frame.
The only problem with raytracing is the extreme processing requirements. It's paralleliseable to a point, until you start having issues with memory bandwidth.
That would be an issue. It woul greatly reduce the cost of distributing media. That would be of benefit to the entertainment industry, but it would benefit pirates even more.
Offload as much bulk traffic as possible to content-addressible networking. Use packet switching for specific-destination time-sensitive communications, and hash-addressed caches for the 'want this, don't care where from' things like static content. With an IP fallback, in case none of the nodes in range have the requested data.
There. That's just greatly reduced the traffic the internet needs to route, added considerable redundency and greatly enhanced the experience for mobile use by allowing for much more effective caching of static content. Two parallel networks, each doing what they are best at. Packet-switching for low-latency 1-to-1 communications, and CAN for dissemination, static content and publication.
Now I just need to find someone with a few hundred million to invest in new infrastructure to support this thing.
He's making a very good martyr though. His suicide drew more attention to the issue of overzealous prosecution and the use of intimidation than staying alive would have.
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Eventually. But Windows 8 is quite toxic enough - it'll be years before they are ready for the next step. Probably around Windows 10.
Employment contracts specify a minimum notice period. While one week is typical for shelf-stacker jobs, an administrator position usually specifies four weeks or 'a week, plus a week for each year in employment here' for exactly this reason.
A sudden transition implies the previous administrator is either leaving unhappy, did something to get fired, or died without warning.
It's basically harmless. Doesn't use significant resources.
Doesn't do you any good though either: Yandex is a Russian search engine. The users speak Russian, so not many are going to be visiting an english-language site.
I don't know what the civil courts are like, but the criminal courts are famous for their >99% conviction rate. They really do exist purely to rubber-stamp arrests. The police are often nice enough to invite visitors to pay a 'reinvestigation fee' to re-examine the case before charging though - if the bribe is to their satisfaction, the charges are dropped.
I would assume the civil courts are similar rubber-stamps for various government agencies: Say something insulting to Putin, and you can expect someone to go over your site looking for a quote you've repeated without permission to use as a pretext to block the site.
They just directed the decision back to the publishers - it's up to them now if they will require games use an always-on connection, or lock each purchase to a specific console or steam account to prevent resale. Microsoft provides support for such restrictions, but doesn't require they be used.
That's going to make writing emulators much easier. Might even be able to do it using hardware-aided virtualisation, nice and fast, and half the code you'd need is already open-source for PC virtualisation.
Orchid growers have similar problems. Some varieties of orchids are very fussy plants - growing them reliably can require elaborate hydroponics setups, warm air ventilation and intense artificial daylight. Being the hardest to grow, these are also the most valuable due to their rarity. The equipment is exactly the same as that used for intensive cannabis production, so there have been many incients of orchid growers being raided by police - they determine the address has purchased hydroponics and grow-lamps, notice a suspiciously hot shed, and conclude it is a secret pot farm. Suppliers of the equipment are also placed under routine monitoring so police can get a list of customers to investigate.
It's to stop people from clogging the courts in protest. It'd be really annoying if the government passed a law of slightly dubious validity and a thousand activists decided to file suit against it. With so many cases going on at once, it's inevitable courts would issue conflicting orders. While such a process could be used to stop unconstitutional laws, it could also be used to stall laws that are perfectly valid but have a dedicated opposition.
I've seen typical users. They get to websites by just typing in the name of the site, and rely on the browser to handle it - which is fine, because all the popular browsers interpret a lone word in the address bar as a search term and go to the default search engine. So it's actually quite common for someone using IE to simply enter 'google' into the bar - and IE will then search this on the default search engine, which is Bing. The user then clicks the top result, ends up at google, and gives their real search.
There was an incident years ago when facebook briefly fell to the #2 slot in the results for 'facebook.' Thus a lot of 'enter name, click top link' people ended up at the wrong site.
Then when they come back with a warrant, they'll make sure to sledgehammer your walls apart, smash your appliances an tear your floorboards up. Just in case you have anything hidden inside. They'll sieze all your computers too as evidence so they can go missing during processing.
The quality and trustworthyness of police in the US varies greatly. Some departments are the picture of politeness and will strive to protect the innocent, while others are vindictive thugs who have a policy of destroying anyone who dares stand against them. It just depends where you live.
Did they ever really define 'metadata?'
Someone probably just decided that a URL is metadata, and the page returned is the data. Google searches put the URL in the address, thus the search can be considered metadata.
If the program is only permitted to collect metadata, then it's not unreasonable to conclude someone may define the term in the broadest possible sense.
The latest rumors, based on some recently released but heavily redacted documents, is that the NSA uses a 'three hop' system. Anyone suspected of terrorism is monitored, even if a US citizen, but the warrant used also includes any of their contacts, and any of their contacts, and any of their contacts. So with just a handful of suspected terrorists, the entire US population is suspect-by-association.
Because most people have a sense of 'justice' that is little more than a polite cover for the urge to see criminals tortured. They'll support just about any abuse of police power, so long as it isn't directed at them.
Every country has its founding myths.
Microsoft is pushing for subscription services because they realised their greatest competitor is themselves from five years ago. Look how long it took to get people off of XP. They reached the point where their software was 'good enough' that no-one has a compelling reason to upgrade to a new version, and the loss of a perpetual upgrade cycle ruins the whole business model.
It also helped that Android had a major corporation behind it, and a lot of manufacturers committed. Companies able to lean on hardware developers and demand that they release decent-quality drivers.
Most of the problem people have with installing linux distros, just as has always been the case, stems from hardware compatibility issues. You install the distro, then find that your sound card isn't supported, or that the video card is but the drivers are terribly buggy, or that the UEFI boot process on the firmware was only properly tested booting Windows and has compatibility issues with anything else. And woe betide you if you want to get your printer working. Linux is rare enough on the desktop that there is just no economic reason for hardware manufacturers to invest the resources into linux support, and this will remain the case until a major OEM makes a serious commitment and has the purchasing power to make it happen. Just as happened for servers already.
Tablets aren't really used for working on. That's what ultrabooks are for. Tablets are great content consumption devices: Video, books, a little web browsing. But how many people use them for serious work?
Eventually, yes. It's screwing up the climate, the extraction process is environmentally damaging, and even if it can be produced domestically it'll still run out given enough time.
But it's also a dense, reliable and very cheap energy source. The only alternatives are either far more expensive or less practical. So it would take many decades to transition away from oil even if the political will existed. Which it doesn't.
That's why most governments have a charge like 'making terroristic threats' to use.
Nixon would probably get away with it these days. He'd just claim the burglers were conducting an anti-terrorism investigation and he had no personal knowledge of it.
Actually, he *did* get away with it. His career was knocked back, but all the blame and the charges fell upon his underlings. Nixon himself resigned, then was granted an unconditional pardon - a very broad one - by his successor. Ford was a fellow Republican, and knew that if Nixon were prosecuted it would bring the entire party into disrepute.
So the lesson? If you're president, and you abuse your power to try to spy upon your political opponents and disrupt their election campaign, you will be granted immunity and retire to a life of casual wealth.
Because raytracing does produce near-reality quality. It solves the shadow/lighting problem - you simply treat diffuse light sources as a very large number of point light sources. All those wonderfully-perfect CGI films and special effects are produced using raytracing... at an hour a frame.
The only problem with raytracing is the extreme processing requirements. It's paralleliseable to a point, until you start having issues with memory bandwidth.
That would be an issue. It woul greatly reduce the cost of distributing media. That would be of benefit to the entertainment industry, but it would benefit pirates even more.
Offload as much bulk traffic as possible to content-addressible networking. Use packet switching for specific-destination time-sensitive communications, and hash-addressed caches for the 'want this, don't care where from' things like static content. With an IP fallback, in case none of the nodes in range have the requested data.
There. That's just greatly reduced the traffic the internet needs to route, added considerable redundency and greatly enhanced the experience for mobile use by allowing for much more effective caching of static content. Two parallel networks, each doing what they are best at. Packet-switching for low-latency 1-to-1 communications, and CAN for dissemination, static content and publication.
Now I just need to find someone with a few hundred million to invest in new infrastructure to support this thing.
He's making a very good martyr though. His suicide drew more attention to the issue of overzealous prosecution and the use of intimidation than staying alive would have.