If they could do that, this problem wouldn't exist in the first place. It's a lot harder to asses content algorithmically than to make a reasonable guess as to what the content is about (good or otherwise). The basic problem with any algorithm to detect something (computer or otherwise) is that people start trying to appease the algorithm, not the thing the algorithm is trying to asses. Want to develop a a way to evaluate teachers? Lets test all the students (that's our algorithm), so the teachers teach to the test, and in the end your data is worthless.
In some respects this is the collision between art and science. Computers do science well, art, not so much. Writing articles is an art, even if the content itself isn't, the skill of making an article catchy or otherwise interesting is really hard to evaluate. The google search algorithm is a good example of what happens when you try and apply science, especially early generation science to and art form. How do you judge the quality of any sort of an article? Early on you pick out key words (what about JS and GB for jon stewart and Glen beck, can I detect those?, you might need a context sensitive language to guess their utility, which is possible but again inefficient), you maybe base your evaluation on the status of the author/publisher (something by thomas friedman in the NYT is probably more relevant to a topic than the random crap I post on a blog), so then you need a system of mathematically describing reputation (good luck dodging a bias there). What's the next pass? How many refeences are made to the article elsewhere is probably good, that's a bit of a messy algorithm performance wise but we'll cope. Next up, you get into (for example) verifiability, that's a hard one to do algorithmically for a large data set, and how do you detect someone trying to screw with your verification algorithm. I'm looking at you Anthony Penis Blair, (that's in reference to his longstanding description on wikipedia which I believe has been fixed), and 'michael jackson is dead' (how do you verify that algorithmically when it's breaking news?). A cursory search turns up http://paidcontent.org/article/419-traditional-ways-of-judging-quality-in-published-content-are-now-useles/ listing the criterion for content as 'crediential, correctness, objectivity, crafstmanship'. We can pretty easily do an ok job on credential, correctness is somewhat harder, objectivity and craftsmanship are a really hard. We could maybe make inroads on objectivity by recognizing different objective sets of data and then trying to (machine) learn whether a piece of data fits in one set or another. Craftsmanship is well outside my area of expertise, how do you evaluate the depth and bredth of an article relative to others?
Even with all that, they're taking second seat to data that can be produced quickly, potentially of lower quality but will attract attention of users. It's not an easy problem to solve, it's not just that it's agorithmically hard to evaluate content on the fly (as any science kid in an arts class will tell you), it's that the audience has moved from wanting a certain type of articles (which print media spent the last 400 years perfecting) to wanting instant access to 'probably' correct information, and they have no great attachment to credientials, partly because we've realized that journalists are largely out to lunch when it comes to complex topics.
The print media guys recognized the first problem, probably in time, but the latter problem too late. They needed to adapt their business and publishing model to have significantly more depth, but not necessarily from in house reporters (basically contract an actual expert on each topic and pair them with a writer, sort of like how news networks bring in experts on everything, but with an actual journalism filter on top of them), and they needed to be willing to say on short notice "we have reports from a single source that michael jackson is in fact dead". Probably the natural alliance here is between p
no, you could be fined for not properly securing the firearm in the first place (which includes not locking your door). I fail to see how that is unreasonable. I have to keep a locked gate around my pool, firearms have to be kept in a secure case etc.
Requiring a password on a wireless network is, at least from a technical security perspective a bit screwy. You can't keep a gun in a cardboard box and call that secure, there are actually government approved gun cases in some places and one naturally must store their firearm in one of those for it to be considered 'secure'. But a password of 1. Or a password sent in plaintext, or a default password or any number of other things that destroys the actual integrity of the password sort of diminishes the point, if the government (in this case german government) is going to require you to pwd protect your network they should require devices sold meet a number of 'assume the user is a moron' standards so that the user must create an actually useful password in the first place - or wilfully not create one.
And china has thermonuclear weapons, and a fusion research programme, so it's not like the DPRK couldn't have 'borrowed' a lot of the technology from the PRC. Put a new metal case on it, new coat of paint, call it a new device.
And let us not forget, the DPRK has built nuclear weapons and a nuclear reactor, going the next step to fusion technology shouldn't really shock anyone. Whether or not it's any good is another matter entirely.
what coalitions actually mean is that the lunatic fringe (yes including the one trick pony pirate party who has nothing meaningful to say on things like EU tax rates, monetary policy, Ukraine or georgia membership in NATO/EU, muslim immigration to europe etc) gets a disproportionate share of power in exchange for not toppling the government, or they get a free reign on a collection of their particular issues, which may, on the whole, be disastrous for the country, but in the short term prop up one party.
In canada we have an even worse scenario. The minority conservatives essentially govern unopposed on all but the most serious of issues because the liberals are too spineless to risk losing another election. In this case we have a party with ~30% popular support governing like it has a majority.
In the UK case, a party - the lib dems, or (god help them) collection of small fringe parties have been handed the power to let the conservatives or theoretically Labour govern. The vast majority of britons looked at what the lib dems offered, said 'he looks nice but no thanks' and actually reduced their vote share - yet they could get cabinet seats. Even worse would be the scenario of say a conservative coalition propped up by the UKIP, SNP etc. (that's the UK independence party and the scottish nationalists party) who at least have opinions on a broad range of issues, but are mostly out of touch with reality. Of course they'd also need to throw some northern ireland only parties in (sinn fein, the democratic unionist party etc..). An impossible mix as I've presented it but one could pick and choose a few from the list.
The EU is a great example of a full on multi party system. The term unmitigated disaster doesn't do it justice. There's a reason everything is so unwieldingly slow as to not get anything useful done on time. Every fringe group gets it's piece of the pie in subsidies and delays so that very little useful is ever actually accomplished. The vision of a united europe acting in concert for the good of it's people and the world is trampled on daily by a bunch of local politians in a trans-federal office asking for 'mine mine mine' at the expense of everyone else - and they're given it to keep coalitions together.
Multi party systems either waffle around in indecesion until eventually a majority is formed (good or bad), or are ruled by a minority acting like a majority due to the incompetent complicity of other parties. Both of these scenarios should be avoided vigorously. The hung parliments of the UK in the 70's led to much of the disastrous state the country was in during the 80's when Thatcher took over, and had put them in the position of needing much more radical and expensive reform than had it been done gradually in the first place. A coalition of lib dem and conservative will see the UK budget funding priorities of two groups at once rather than one, leaving no one partiuclarly happy and the public purse that much worse off (which given it's current state is a sad commentary).
With governments it matters less which party is in charge, than there being only one group in charge. If you cannot pass a budget the government shuts down, which is, despite the libertarian bent on/. is an extremely bad thing to have happen. Major strategic priorites (whether it be nuclear weapons and aircraft carriers like currently in britain or the environment and the budget in the US) get more or less ignored until a majority is formed to pick up the pieces. It matters less to your employer (even if that's you) what healthcare plan is being chosen, as long as they know which one it is, they can prepare for it, and that is only one of many examples.
At every stage people should resist proportial representation and multi party systems - for all of the things wrong with the US system, and there are many, at least one of the parties is actually able to make decisions and pass budgets. Indecision is the enemy of future planning.
yes because clearly it's in the interest of playboy to have kids and parents getting letters about kids looking at playboy at school.
Clearly it's good for a porn company when it's paying customers get fired for using their product when at work, and no longer have jobs to pay for their product.
Either way official avenues to your product are going to get blocked, better to make it easier and straightforward on everyone.
ya but if you're a legitimate porn company you don't want your product showing up legally from you on school computers or in a place that will get your customers fired. If someone has to pirate your product to view it on school/library/work computers that's fine - you aren't going to get in trouble over it (it's not our fault he was looking at our stuff without our permission basically).
Sure, lots of other sites will still make it available, but if you're a legitimate porn seller I would expect you to want to be supporting filtering as best you can. If people really don't want to (or shouldn't) be seeing your content right now, then you don't want them to. If I were a big porn company I'd be sitting on the existing.com.country.whatever domain and just having a redirect to the.xxx site. Then no nutcase in south caronlina can say 'CondeZer0 is trying to corrupt our youth by making his porn onto our school computers!', because if he does your reply is 'block all.xxx and you wont' see it'.
Ok so I make it available free on the internet. Climate denier and all his 150 million friends spread around a link to 'get the real data yourself'. And crash my server. Repeatedly. How much time do I have to spend managing this server? Who's going to pay for it?
If you have someone who is out to hamper your research posting it on the web somewhere and claiming it's done isn't exactly going to work. Whether you call it a formal FOI requests or just a public data publishing it there will be people demanding you produce the 'full' data set (which may or may not actually mean anything), and working hard to hamper it's release. Now lets say you're an optics guy who studies rydberg atoms and there are all of about 8 research groups in the world who do this sort of thing, none of which is particularly contentious. Then you can (and regularly do) post your data and the occasional random data download by someone in vietnamn isn't going to cause you a problem. But if all the/. ers out there go and download some I can think of a few servers that will be down for the day, and that's a lot of PhD's in physics not getting much work done.
and how long do you keep your data for, and available, who is going to pay to make it available and supported? I worked in a lab that had equipment with computers from, I kid you not, 1983 in storage. Unfortunately none of this equipment still worked, or had any meaningfully recoverable data on it, nor was the person who knew how to operate this equipment still employed, as he had been retired for the better part of a decade.
If your data is, (for example) climate data from 100 stations recording data every hour for 10 years you have close to 9 million data points (assuming everything worked perfectly), you aren't just going to print that off and hand it out with your paper. What do you do when you got your PhD in 1980 where your data is from somewhere else (say you take data from the oh so fictional national department of measuring things people might want), and it's now 2010, can you be expected to reproduce that data? Should the department of measuring things provide it? What liability do you have if they don't provide it (or can't)? Who should host the data? You, or the instutition where the work was done (for how long?).
Lets say you stored all of your data on hard drives in 1983, wrote your paper, and then didn't do anything with the drive but put it in storage, which has since gone loopy. What do you do about that data, which, in the specific case of climate change might be a problem since old info might be relevant?
What about process then? Well wait, if I just spent 4 years of my life writing this piece of software, and am now working very hard to get tenure (and 5 more papers naturally) out of it, if I just give it away for free one of my competitors who isn't teaching 5 courses and isn't even from my country can then use my software (analysis etc..) to churn out papers without so much as putting my name as an author on the paper, and even if it's possible to sort out any potential ethics violation and get myself credit I'm now long past due for getting tenure and SOL. Besides, don't let other scientists be lazy, if you give them your software and they use it, and come to the same result you haven't actually learned anything other than your software works the same on several computers, you want to write a paper (algorithm, pseudo code whatever you want to call it) level description of the process you think you implemented, and let someone else first asses the process they think you implemented, and then compare to the process you actually implemented as the next step.
The real world of academia is hardly as simplistic as you would like it to be, politicians love blind ideologue statements about improving transparancy (what political party doesn't) but when it comes to the details of how exactly one goes about this. Which is why there are a lot of names of professors on the research reports - sort of by definition a blue ribbon committee doing what it does by definition; staying independent of politcal influence and using their expertise to judge a topic on it's merits. There's nothing in the snippits of the reports which I have time to read which indicates anything other than the scientists accomodated all reasonable requests for data and process as best they could. There is a big weakness in UK law in dealing with FOI and academic research. Essentially should a researcher be allowed to be bogged down with FOI requests? If so, what should that mean for their professional career? Requests for data take time to respond to, but how do you manage that with the expectation that the researcher is going to do something other than just be a data delivery clerk (and if you want data delivery clerks who is going to pay them)?
Ideally you want data from multiple sources and independent analysis from multiple sources and compare - then you go after the process to see where the differences are (or might be). This comparison in science is a glorious excersie in statistics rarely understood in detail by anyone but statisticians (and even then half of them are of questionable u
the matlab guys probably don't want to waste the time effort and money building production tools for a software/hardware standard that may not exist two years from now, and may, between when they starting writing and when they finish be completely different. I did my MSc as a project in CUDA. It's not bad, it's too new for a lot of businesses though. GPU acceleration is a RIGHT NOW kind of thing, that's not bad, but a year from now they may have a completely new, completely different API (which may or may not actually stick around and be supported by other vendors, which is the question with DX11 compute stuff and OpenCL). Hiring a bunch of CUDA specialists is an expensive venture with too much risk I bet. Now jumping on the DX11 DirectCompute or the OpenCl standard doesn't seem out of the question, but, again, a year from now they might be completely different. Also NVIDIA just launched dx11 parts, 6 months of ATI parts is hardly enough to say they should necessarily have this right now.
I've played around with a couple of configurations and cannot see any of my machines with the same problem. I'm wondering if it's related to a specific driver or hardware vendor or the like that my 3 different computers don't have.
It jumps out at me that something like the NVIDIA 196.75 drivers which are broken and kill video cards or the like might be the sort of culprit, like if you've got a system restore point with some driver that WHQL has flagged specifically as bad (or as an invalid WHQL certificate or something) it blows away those restore points. Not exactly a graceful solution but it's probably better than killing your computer.
There are a lot of things which can effect restore points though, remaining disk space, settings, age of the restore points and so on, for all I know there could be some esoteric option there which does it.
On both 7 and vista I've found restore points super helpful (definitely not so in XP), so I'd be interested to know what the thinking at MS is about when to silently delete restore points and when not to.
Um european not american governments. In europe the governments regularly own all, or part of airlines, airports, aircraft manufacturing and so on. Either way they're on the hook. They actually do want to look like they're doing something to help the state owned whatever company on a regular basis, since that wins votes, when you're the socialist party you want to look like you're giving out money to support businesses.
I'm not sure why anyone thinks airlines wouldn't get compensated for volcanic ash. It's not anyone's fault, but with consumer protection laws in Europe a lot of these airlines (some with government ownership some without) can be on the hook for hotel fees etc. for stranded passengers who were buying 100 dollar flights but racking up hundreds of dollars in hotel fees and so on - no business can handle that well. 0 revenue, and actually *increasing* expenses, because you can't lay your staff off (unions + wanting to fly on a moments notice), you can't just refund the money to the customer you have to actually pay them for something that isn't your fault. Then it's just a matter of degree, 1% of flights every day they probably need to factor into their own spending,
And of course, if the airlines collapse that strands passengers (and they have to call in the navy to rescue them), costs jobs and ultimately isn't worth the hit to the public purse compared to the costs of bailing them out for a few days of down time. If they're government owned (even partially) the government also wants to keep it's direct investment. Then there's the whole Airbus thing, if an airline goes bankrupt it reduces the value of aircraft, and since half of Europe owns EADS (airbus + some other stuff), that's bad for their own aircraft manufacturing business.
In general governments want to bail out a business when it's cheaper than letting it go bankrupt, even the Americans, but in Europe governments are directly tied into the aeroplane, airport, air traffic etc. chain and have an even larger vested interest in not having an airline going bankrupt.
in the short term it will add value to IPv4 addresses, and organizations not using them might *gasp* make money getting rid of ones it doesn't need. That's not a bad thing. We have this problem with spectrum too, there's no particular cost in having a huge chunk idling away once you've got it. Anything which motivated more efficient utilization is good, and money creates a motivation.
A short term will drive up the cost of IPv4 addresses will, in turn, make IPv6 look much more economically viable to people who actually pay for things. As with everything else in the real wold: money makes things happen. IPv6 isn't magically cheaper than IPv4, so no one has been all that bothered about it, so either you lower the cost of IPv6 or raise the cost of IPv4, and running out of IPv4 addresses manages the latter nicely.
No, but they could reasonably compensate you for say, a week behind bars erroneously. If we can agree there is *any* amount of time they can compensate you for, and some amount of time that money simply cannot make up for, then we're merely discussing degree.
Maybe your threshold for 'not possible to compensate' is 30 years, but what about people who say well, 30 years, that's worth 3.2715 million euros to me. But 60 years, that I can't put a price on?
ya but those cases, as he reasonably explains, tend to get specialized development (say scientific computing), or separate processes, or while he doesn't explain it, a lot of server stuff is embarrassingly (or close to) parallel.
I can sort of see them not having a multi-processor OS just waiting for the consumer desktop- server processors are basically cache with some processor attached, whereas desktop processors are architected differently, and who knew for sure what the mutlicore world would look like in detail (or more relevantly what it will look like with 4, 8 or 16 or whatever cores). How will those cores be connected? How symmetric/asymmetric will they be? Right now OS's are built around two big asymmetric processors (cpu and gpu) and several smaller specialized ones (networking sound etc). Some of those architecture things *could* be fairly fundamental to the design you want to use, and there's no point investing huge development time trying to build software for hardware which doesn't exist and may never exist.
I'm not sure about his proposed architecture. It doesn't sound easily backwards compatible (but I might be wrong there), and there's a certain simplicity to 'reserve one core for the OS, application developers can manage the rest of them themselves' sort of model like consoles.
And a bit of an and underhanded advert for ATI. 'Password recovery' is an inherently parallel problem that really likes the sort of math gpus do, and not so much the sort CPU's do. The ATI 5000 series are the fastest GPU's available at retail right now, doesn't take a genius to put 2 and 2 together here. Anyone who knows anything about NVIDIA's workstation parts knows they are not radical departures from their current retail chips so saying your new fancy retail part is twice as fast as the workstation version of the other guys last gen part is stating the obvious.
why would the chinese particularly care about what a guy who died 34 years ago might have actually done? Does it meaningfully change what policies they should have today? Does it change economic or job growth predictions?
And why do you think Li is a thug exactly? Every government censors content to protect the rights of a country and it's people, they may do, to varying degrees, a worse or better job of it, but the government decides what is illegal, and companies are expected to not show you illegal content. "publication bans" "ratings" "film classification board" "classified" etc. are all to some degree forms of censorship.
How much of what Gerald Ford did is still under lock and key? And how do you know, until they take it out from under lock and key?
You and the government of china may disagree on what effects the rights of china and the chinese people, but their censorship vs anyone elses is a matter of degree. They have decided that political instability is not worth the 'truth' or that the 'truth' should be buried, but not completely. See the PRC lets thousands if not millions of chinese leave the country and then come back every year, and they go places where there is less censorship, yet still it doesn't seem like they're shocked and all try and start a revolution over it. They need a small army of people to police things which are censored, and again, they obviously know what is being censored and yet aren't starting a revolution about it. So I fail to see the great outrage over china censoring things 30 years old. One would I think have a better argument with their current environmental, corruption and pro democracy protests. Those at least actually mean something right now, and people might care about it today. Whether or not a guy who died 34 years ago killed more or less people than a guy who died 62 years ago is somewhat less important to people who may wish to change how the country is run.
unless of course the chinese people believe the government when it declares something negative or corrupting. Government influence extends well beyond any single medium, and lasts far longer than the lifespan of the average search engine. Governments can shape public perception, for the better or worse, and they can shape it over decades.
Consider a similar situation in north America. Imagine a gov't body comes out and says Yahoo is doing something wildly inappropriate. Well it may be, it may be censorship, but yahoo isn't big enough, and the public naturally views yahoo with enough suspicion about it's business model (really, someone offered you 40 billion dollars for a webpage, and you didn't take it... what's going on there?) they may not question too deeply. It's not like Google is the big dog in china, if they get shut down it's playing to the base who want a ban on japanese cars because they're supposedly unsafe or who don't like the idea of 'offshoring'. To china Google is a foreign influence, and lets face it, no one with a brain trusts american corporations. I don't trust canadian corporations or chinese corporations particularly either, but I trust US corporations in my country less. If the chinese government says to the people of china google is a meddlesome foreign power they will probably be believed, and continue not using google and not shed a tear when google is turfed out of their country.
Also note that china (and lots of other relatively poor areas) have been told for decades to basically fear western corporations because they'll come in and destroy the economy, take away all the jobs etc. Admittedly we've been told almost the reverse in the west, but they are dealing with the vestiges of colonialism. China especially works hard to make sure chinese consumers are served by chinese businesses. They don't want US/Japanese DVD's, computers cars etc. they want to make their own, and make ours and then sell us ours. It's not a system which can last of course, but their perceptions are going to be pretty strongly against the west.
that's only for their 'gutted' products. Which isn't everything. They usually have one gutted that makes up the store display, and then several unopened in the back or otherwise locked up. If you buy the last in stock of an item they give you the store display and the gutted disk.
Used are usually all gutted.
This thing with newegg almost looks like they are promo boxes or mock ups that got accidentally shipped out.
or because they don't hire very many people with good ideas, and when they do, those people want things which cost money, and you can only spend money in government if it's to pander to a voting district and not to actually accomplish any sort of objective goal driven task. Of course if you want to get people who have good ideas on how to do things you also need to pay them decent salaries, which in many cases can be well over the 400k/year that the president makes or the 200k ish per year governor/provincial premiers make, and that's a political hot potato no one wants.
On top of all that, why bother? Staff want improved efficiency, but what do government managers care? Their staff levels are the same either way, their workload is the same either way, being more efficient so you can lay people off (which you can't do) or have them sit around and do nothing isn't helpful either. Most government agencies change in size at a glacial pace.
Governments are exceptionally good at wasting huge amounts of money accounting for how huge amounts of money are spent, which prevents managers having access to discretionary spending to try and improve efficiency. I bet the US government employs a total of about 35-40 million people (not all directly) (3.5 Trillion budget/13.5 trillion GDP, * 150 million working age in US), and I would bet within that there are literally millions of managers who, in the private sector would have access to much more money to improve efficiency. In government if even one of those guys is caught using the money on something politically unpalatable or just wildly inappropriate then the government brings in new measures to prevent this happening again, bad press then wastes millions accounting for the thousands some idiot spent on hookers or hammers made in China and not Kentucky.
The political football here is the challenge. Conservatives tend to view government as the enemy (it isn't), and socialists want the government to go too far the other way and own too much, and liberals are trying to balance the two. Whenever something goes wrong socialists demand more people be employed to account for how to fix it, conservatives demand everyone be fired and in the end nothing useful happens. The US system has crept towards more and more public disclosure of the specifics of expenditure, on the face of it that sounds good, but it opens up individual congressmen into being bullied to show their returns locally, and preventing agencies from paying talented experienced people to do thing which are best done with talent and experience.
Don't get me wrong, accountability and efficiency are both worthy goals but they are somewhat counter to each other, governments err too much on the side of accountability, business on the side of efficiency. Every now and then someone comes along and overhauls a system, in this regard businesses benefit much more than the US government (but not so much other federal governments). In a business you overhaul to stay successful, if someone else has reorganized and is more profitable because of it you spend the money and follow suit. Other governments tend to face this as well (eventually). If those frenchies can do X why can't we? But in the US any sort of outward inspection is often not considered at all. The perks of being the biggest and (at least temporarily) most powerful government in the world is that you don't have to listen to anyone, the problem is that if you don't eventually they'll do things better than you. Healthcare being the perfect example. The Europeans especially and the rest of the rich world in general regularly try and steal good ideas from each other. But the US, well you have to have a made in America solution to a problem well solved by someone else already. And my god, we cannot consider evidence of how and why those other systems work because that might be listening to the French and they're socialists!
The current US government deficit is both a boon to policy and a major hamper on it. I feel bad for anyone trying to make major decisions. The lack of money will force efficiencies on the system, but creating efficiencies and adding value tends to have an upfront cost which there's no way to bear.
I dunno, I can imagine a 3D gaming tapestry taking up half my wall, and I can imagine redundant computing boxes in the house for my kids (whom I haven't had yet, and must presume they will live at home in 2030) and their half wall gaming/TV tapestries. And my girlfriend will probably want something to browse her recipes and listen to music on, not to stereotype mind you, he computer can do a lot more than that now, she just seems to only care about recipes and listening to music.
A computer that costs a billion dollars to do today, 20 years from now it will presumably cost in the small number of thousands. If I had a billion dollars in computing today I can think of a whole lot of really cool, albeit frivolous things I would do.
Sept 11/01 wasn't a declaration of war. It was a single attack in a war that had been ongoing since Bin laden declared it august 23rd or thereabouts 1996, it read in part "declaration of jihad against the Americans occupying the Land of the Two Holy Mosques (Saudi Arabia); expel the heretics from the Arabian Peninsula.”
Granted lots of nutjobs of varying efficacy have declared war on the united states, Osama bin laden and Al Qaeda happen to be the largest most successful non government entity I can think of so far (at least, in 1996 AQ was a non state entity, by 2001 one could argue their alliance with the taleban made them one but that's a whole other issue).
If you read some of the stuff about AQ those guys weren't exactly fond of the US in the 80's, it was just a less present threat than the soviets in Afghanistan, and once that war was over they shifted focus. But there is some fairly complex strategic disagreement and organizational structure stuff in the various terrorist groups. They mostly agree on viewing various governments as little more than puppet states of the US (or whomever they don't like), but cannot agree on whether to go after the puppet governments first or the US. If you believe Israel, or Saudi or Russia for all it matters is nothing more than a proxy for the US government and you declare war on the proxy you can reasonably be considered, by extension to view the US as the real target of the declaration of war. On top of all that they're trying to work all the angles at once, by merging in different groups with different priorities. It means every now and then the pull off something spectacular, but most of the time an "Al qaeda supporter' is a dude hip spraying an AK in Iraq and immediately getting killed.
How big a group has to be before their declaring war warrants much consideration is a mess, and sort of underpins the article's contention that one random guy who declares war on the US and builds himself a few drones is kind of a problem. Spending millions of dollars to stop hundreds of dollars of drones would, on a purely economic basis, appear to be a win for the guy with the drones.
And the emulation would be game specific. The principle of storing your save game online is that each game (ACII, and dawn of discovery for example) would store its own data in potentially a different fashion.
Right now most DRM is applied *after* the game is done, or put another way, once you figure out DRM system A it's basically the same on every game that uses DRM system A. Revision A.1 is going to be basically the same as A, but not quite. Under the 'we own your save games' system a hacker needs to either spoof a client sending data to the server, or spoof the server for the client. Unless Ubisoft is completely brain dead (which admittedly they might be) the specific content of the client - server interactions will be different for every game. If the DRM just has the game make a save game file, and then sends it to a home server, and then load is just sending the same file back from said server in exactly the same fashion for every game that's going to be relatively easy to compromise, but as you say, if every game does something different there' s a game specific chunk of overhead in fixing it.
I can see a marketing duel coming; consumers: give me control of my data! Ubisoft: We'll save your game so you don't have to, no need to find it again or lose your progress if your computer dies! It's a bit of moving your data to the big evil corporate cloud, from the big evil corporate controlled and somewhat faulty system of your own hardware. I'm not really sure where I stand on that. I have a lot of stuff on my shelf from publishers/dev's who no longer exist, but then on PC the vast majority of it doesn't work anymore anyway. I am not however going to give Ubisoft money for a PC product released months after the console version which they are only using as an experiment in how to control my game playing.
It's not free. It's more efficient. For comparable outcomes we spend less per capita (both in absolute numbers and as a percentage of GDP). http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/hea_spe_per_per-health-spending-per-person, http://www.newswire.ca/en/releases/archive/November2009/19/c2310.html, the wiki on US healthcare spending has a nice chart of spending as a % of GDP etc. Note: I would say Norway, Luxembourg, iceland and anything below #20 on the first list cannot be meaningfully compared to the US with any ease. Luxembourg is too rich and small, iceland too small, and norway has huge mountain of oil wealth for a small country.
In some senses it is free. If you're a student, it's free. If you're poor, it's free. If you're starting a business that isn't going to make any money for 2 years, it's free. You don't pay an insurance premium, you don't risk being denied care and if you get cancer 3 times by the time you're 30 but don't have a job, you'll still be covered when you're 31 and not trying to find an insurance company. I don't pay out of pocket for it, nor do people in the UK france etc. I can pay out of pocket for extra stuff, a TV in my hospital room, coverage to get a private room in a hospital that sort of thing (and oddly dental, for which in Ontario in canada we have no coverage, the UK does though). But healthcare fees coming out of taxation means the costs are graduated, if you make a million dollars a year you pay a lot more into healthcare in Canada than your equivalent southern neighbour, but if you're poor, you pay nothing. And you don't worry about your healthcare coverage when switching jobs, or starting a new business or the like, because it's just covered. Mostly. Dental and in some cases pharmaceuticals aren't in canada, which is stupid but whatever. Is is free in the sense that how much I use the service does not particularly influence my cost. If I need 1.2 million dollars in care this year, my fee for next year does not go up, if I'm in a high risk category now, my fee does not go up.
If you go back to that first list, the UK and France have the best ideas. The UK gets decent coverage for everyone and they do it on the cheap. The NHS is an extremely cost effective method of delivering decent healthcare. The french system is, since their summer heatwave crisis that killed thousands of people, arguably the best in the world. They pay a fairly high amount as a percentage of gdp for that but they get top notch care. In practice I think the british model is better, mostly because if you set the bar for yourself too high your costs will eventually spiral out of control. If you set the bar at 'reasonable' costs will grow at reasonable rates. But that's a philosophical thing. Canada suffers enormously because we set the bar as 'better than the americans', which is setting a highjump bar around gary colemans ankles. Whenever something is wrong in canada we get away with saying well it's better than the americans. Which is true, but the French and british can do better, either better results or more cost effectively? But we're better off than the americans! At least having government control means that when healthcare goes badly (see the france thousands of people dying due to heatwave thing) politicians actually take seriously fixing it, because their jobs are on the line if they don't. The healthcare company is in the business of trying to avoid providing you service, the government is in the business of trying to provide you the most affordable service.
Minimally competent healthcare reform in the US could save a couple of thousand dollars per person, which is about 4000 per tax payer, it would mean you don't have to pay healthcare, either through your employer or privately, but you would pay higher taxes, on average. For the 40 odd million people who don't have care at all (presumably because they can't afford it), it would become free, and people for who have coverage but are poor they'd still be covered. It would hurt the chairman of GM and his 60K/mo
There's probably a psychological threshold. If most linux desktop apps are small, say a couple of hundred mebibytes, then it's going to take say 15 seconds to get the data from disk and 5 or so to load it up into memory, if you cache it in ram, and it now takes 1.5 seconds to access in memory and 5 to process (you still have to move the data to the processor) you've got from a system that takes say 21.5 seconds to load to one that takes 6.5 to load or roughly 1/3rd. Yes that's all canned off the top of my head. It's noticable, but people are tolerant of 15 seconds here or there, but it's a lot of development time to trim that down.
A really big app, (say world of warcraft), which takes 500 or 600 megs in memory - but a different 500 or 600 depending on where you are, cannot be all that effectively cached by the OS, so it's the same slow loading either way.
In that sense there's probably fairly small set of apps that users would notice and care about a feature like prefetching. It's not bad to have, but it's not critical. Probably you go and you set some thresholds, we want to load small applications that currently take one minute to load to load in 10 seconds, but applications that take 2 minutes to load, well we can't do anything with anyway, and applications that take 30 seconds to load will now load in 8 maybe, and that sort of thing. The more memory you have the easier that is, but the more memory you have the more memory big apps (like the future equivalent of world of warcraft) will use, and you're not, in terms of average load times, any further ahead.
On a server, the applications you want are usually already running, (if they aren't running odds are the server is rebooting so caching hasn't helped you a whole lot), and they need to handle caching their own data in their own way, the OS doesn't know which webpages are most likely to be served by your web server application sort of thing.
Slashdot Mirror
If they could do that, this problem wouldn't exist in the first place. It's a lot harder to asses content algorithmically than to make a reasonable guess as to what the content is about (good or otherwise). The basic problem with any algorithm to detect something (computer or otherwise) is that people start trying to appease the algorithm, not the thing the algorithm is trying to asses. Want to develop a a way to evaluate teachers? Lets test all the students (that's our algorithm), so the teachers teach to the test, and in the end your data is worthless.
In some respects this is the collision between art and science. Computers do science well, art, not so much. Writing articles is an art, even if the content itself isn't, the skill of making an article catchy or otherwise interesting is really hard to evaluate. The google search algorithm is a good example of what happens when you try and apply science, especially early generation science to and art form. How do you judge the quality of any sort of an article? Early on you pick out key words (what about JS and GB for jon stewart and Glen beck, can I detect those?, you might need a context sensitive language to guess their utility, which is possible but again inefficient), you maybe base your evaluation on the status of the author/publisher (something by thomas friedman in the NYT is probably more relevant to a topic than the random crap I post on a blog), so then you need a system of mathematically describing reputation (good luck dodging a bias there). What's the next pass? How many refeences are made to the article elsewhere is probably good, that's a bit of a messy algorithm performance wise but we'll cope. Next up, you get into (for example) verifiability, that's a hard one to do algorithmically for a large data set, and how do you detect someone trying to screw with your verification algorithm. I'm looking at you Anthony Penis Blair, (that's in reference to his longstanding description on wikipedia which I believe has been fixed), and 'michael jackson is dead' (how do you verify that algorithmically when it's breaking news?). A cursory search turns up http://paidcontent.org/article/419-traditional-ways-of-judging-quality-in-published-content-are-now-useles/ listing the criterion for content as 'crediential, correctness, objectivity, crafstmanship'. We can pretty easily do an ok job on credential, correctness is somewhat harder, objectivity and craftsmanship are a really hard. We could maybe make inroads on objectivity by recognizing different objective sets of data and then trying to (machine) learn whether a piece of data fits in one set or another. Craftsmanship is well outside my area of expertise, how do you evaluate the depth and bredth of an article relative to others?
Even with all that, they're taking second seat to data that can be produced quickly, potentially of lower quality but will attract attention of users. It's not an easy problem to solve, it's not just that it's agorithmically hard to evaluate content on the fly (as any science kid in an arts class will tell you), it's that the audience has moved from wanting a certain type of articles (which print media spent the last 400 years perfecting) to wanting instant access to 'probably' correct information, and they have no great attachment to credientials, partly because we've realized that journalists are largely out to lunch when it comes to complex topics.
The print media guys recognized the first problem, probably in time, but the latter problem too late. They needed to adapt their business and publishing model to have significantly more depth, but not necessarily from in house reporters (basically contract an actual expert on each topic and pair them with a writer, sort of like how news networks bring in experts on everything, but with an actual journalism filter on top of them), and they needed to be willing to say on short notice "we have reports from a single source that michael jackson is in fact dead". Probably the natural alliance here is between p
no, you could be fined for not properly securing the firearm in the first place (which includes not locking your door). I fail to see how that is unreasonable. I have to keep a locked gate around my pool, firearms have to be kept in a secure case etc.
Requiring a password on a wireless network is, at least from a technical security perspective a bit screwy. You can't keep a gun in a cardboard box and call that secure, there are actually government approved gun cases in some places and one naturally must store their firearm in one of those for it to be considered 'secure'. But a password of 1. Or a password sent in plaintext, or a default password or any number of other things that destroys the actual integrity of the password sort of diminishes the point, if the government (in this case german government) is going to require you to pwd protect your network they should require devices sold meet a number of 'assume the user is a moron' standards so that the user must create an actually useful password in the first place - or wilfully not create one.
And china has thermonuclear weapons, and a fusion research programme, so it's not like the DPRK couldn't have 'borrowed' a lot of the technology from the PRC. Put a new metal case on it, new coat of paint, call it a new device.
And let us not forget, the DPRK has built nuclear weapons and a nuclear reactor, going the next step to fusion technology shouldn't really shock anyone. Whether or not it's any good is another matter entirely.
what coalitions actually mean is that the lunatic fringe (yes including the one trick pony pirate party who has nothing meaningful to say on things like EU tax rates, monetary policy, Ukraine or georgia membership in NATO/EU, muslim immigration to europe etc) gets a disproportionate share of power in exchange for not toppling the government, or they get a free reign on a collection of their particular issues, which may, on the whole, be disastrous for the country, but in the short term prop up one party.
In canada we have an even worse scenario. The minority conservatives essentially govern unopposed on all but the most serious of issues because the liberals are too spineless to risk losing another election. In this case we have a party with ~30% popular support governing like it has a majority.
In the UK case, a party - the lib dems, or (god help them) collection of small fringe parties have been handed the power to let the conservatives or theoretically Labour govern. The vast majority of britons looked at what the lib dems offered, said 'he looks nice but no thanks' and actually reduced their vote share - yet they could get cabinet seats. Even worse would be the scenario of say a conservative coalition propped up by the UKIP, SNP etc. (that's the UK independence party and the scottish nationalists party) who at least have opinions on a broad range of issues, but are mostly out of touch with reality. Of course they'd also need to throw some northern ireland only parties in (sinn fein, the democratic unionist party etc..). An impossible mix as I've presented it but one could pick and choose a few from the list.
The EU is a great example of a full on multi party system. The term unmitigated disaster doesn't do it justice. There's a reason everything is so unwieldingly slow as to not get anything useful done on time. Every fringe group gets it's piece of the pie in subsidies and delays so that very little useful is ever actually accomplished. The vision of a united europe acting in concert for the good of it's people and the world is trampled on daily by a bunch of local politians in a trans-federal office asking for 'mine mine mine' at the expense of everyone else - and they're given it to keep coalitions together.
Multi party systems either waffle around in indecesion until eventually a majority is formed (good or bad), or are ruled by a minority acting like a majority due to the incompetent complicity of other parties. Both of these scenarios should be avoided vigorously. The hung parliments of the UK in the 70's led to much of the disastrous state the country was in during the 80's when Thatcher took over, and had put them in the position of needing much more radical and expensive reform than had it been done gradually in the first place. A coalition of lib dem and conservative will see the UK budget funding priorities of two groups at once rather than one, leaving no one partiuclarly happy and the public purse that much worse off (which given it's current state is a sad commentary).
With governments it matters less which party is in charge, than there being only one group in charge. If you cannot pass a budget the government shuts down, which is, despite the libertarian bent on /. is an extremely bad thing to have happen. Major strategic priorites (whether it be nuclear weapons and aircraft carriers like currently in britain or the environment and the budget in the US) get more or less ignored until a majority is formed to pick up the pieces. It matters less to your employer (even if that's you) what healthcare plan is being chosen, as long as they know which one it is, they can prepare for it, and that is only one of many examples.
At every stage people should resist proportial representation and multi party systems - for all of the things wrong with the US system, and there are many, at least one of the parties is actually able to make decisions and pass budgets. Indecision is the enemy of future planning.
I realize the pirate party is
yes because clearly it's in the interest of playboy to have kids and parents getting letters about kids looking at playboy at school.
Clearly it's good for a porn company when it's paying customers get fired for using their product when at work, and no longer have jobs to pay for their product.
Either way official avenues to your product are going to get blocked, better to make it easier and straightforward on everyone.
ya but if you're a legitimate porn company you don't want your product showing up legally from you on school computers or in a place that will get your customers fired. If someone has to pirate your product to view it on school/library/work computers that's fine - you aren't going to get in trouble over it (it's not our fault he was looking at our stuff without our permission basically).
Sure, lots of other sites will still make it available, but if you're a legitimate porn seller I would expect you to want to be supporting filtering as best you can. If people really don't want to (or shouldn't) be seeing your content right now, then you don't want them to. If I were a big porn company I'd be sitting on the existing .com .country .whatever domain and just having a redirect to the .xxx site. Then no nutcase in south caronlina can say 'CondeZer0 is trying to corrupt our youth by making his porn onto our school computers!', because if he does your reply is 'block all .xxx and you wont' see it'.
Ok so I make it available free on the internet. Climate denier and all his 150 million friends spread around a link to 'get the real data yourself'. And crash my server. Repeatedly. How much time do I have to spend managing this server? Who's going to pay for it?
If you have someone who is out to hamper your research posting it on the web somewhere and claiming it's done isn't exactly going to work. Whether you call it a formal FOI requests or just a public data publishing it there will be people demanding you produce the 'full' data set (which may or may not actually mean anything), and working hard to hamper it's release. Now lets say you're an optics guy who studies rydberg atoms and there are all of about 8 research groups in the world who do this sort of thing, none of which is particularly contentious. Then you can (and regularly do) post your data and the occasional random data download by someone in vietnamn isn't going to cause you a problem. But if all the /. ers out there go and download some I can think of a few servers that will be down for the day, and that's a lot of PhD's in physics not getting much work done.
and how long do you keep your data for, and available, who is going to pay to make it available and supported? I worked in a lab that had equipment with computers from, I kid you not, 1983 in storage. Unfortunately none of this equipment still worked, or had any meaningfully recoverable data on it, nor was the person who knew how to operate this equipment still employed, as he had been retired for the better part of a decade.
If your data is, (for example) climate data from 100 stations recording data every hour for 10 years you have close to 9 million data points (assuming everything worked perfectly), you aren't just going to print that off and hand it out with your paper. What do you do when you got your PhD in 1980 where your data is from somewhere else (say you take data from the oh so fictional national department of measuring things people might want), and it's now 2010, can you be expected to reproduce that data? Should the department of measuring things provide it? What liability do you have if they don't provide it (or can't)? Who should host the data? You, or the instutition where the work was done (for how long?).
Lets say you stored all of your data on hard drives in 1983, wrote your paper, and then didn't do anything with the drive but put it in storage, which has since gone loopy. What do you do about that data, which, in the specific case of climate change might be a problem since old info might be relevant?
What about process then? Well wait, if I just spent 4 years of my life writing this piece of software, and am now working very hard to get tenure (and 5 more papers naturally) out of it, if I just give it away for free one of my competitors who isn't teaching 5 courses and isn't even from my country can then use my software (analysis etc..) to churn out papers without so much as putting my name as an author on the paper, and even if it's possible to sort out any potential ethics violation and get myself credit I'm now long past due for getting tenure and SOL. Besides, don't let other scientists be lazy, if you give them your software and they use it, and come to the same result you haven't actually learned anything other than your software works the same on several computers, you want to write a paper (algorithm, pseudo code whatever you want to call it) level description of the process you think you implemented, and let someone else first asses the process they think you implemented, and then compare to the process you actually implemented as the next step.
The real world of academia is hardly as simplistic as you would like it to be, politicians love blind ideologue statements about improving transparancy (what political party doesn't) but when it comes to the details of how exactly one goes about this. Which is why there are a lot of names of professors on the research reports - sort of by definition a blue ribbon committee doing what it does by definition; staying independent of politcal influence and using their expertise to judge a topic on it's merits. There's nothing in the snippits of the reports which I have time to read which indicates anything other than the scientists accomodated all reasonable requests for data and process as best they could. There is a big weakness in UK law in dealing with FOI and academic research. Essentially should a researcher be allowed to be bogged down with FOI requests? If so, what should that mean for their professional career? Requests for data take time to respond to, but how do you manage that with the expectation that the researcher is going to do something other than just be a data delivery clerk (and if you want data delivery clerks who is going to pay them)?
Ideally you want data from multiple sources and independent analysis from multiple sources and compare - then you go after the process to see where the differences are (or might be). This comparison in science is a glorious excersie in statistics rarely understood in detail by anyone but statisticians (and even then half of them are of questionable u
the matlab guys probably don't want to waste the time effort and money building production tools for a software/hardware standard that may not exist two years from now, and may, between when they starting writing and when they finish be completely different. I did my MSc as a project in CUDA. It's not bad, it's too new for a lot of businesses though. GPU acceleration is a RIGHT NOW kind of thing, that's not bad, but a year from now they may have a completely new, completely different API (which may or may not actually stick around and be supported by other vendors, which is the question with DX11 compute stuff and OpenCL). Hiring a bunch of CUDA specialists is an expensive venture with too much risk I bet. Now jumping on the DX11 DirectCompute or the OpenCl standard doesn't seem out of the question, but, again, a year from now they might be completely different. Also NVIDIA just launched dx11 parts, 6 months of ATI parts is hardly enough to say they should necessarily have this right now.
I've played around with a couple of configurations and cannot see any of my machines with the same problem. I'm wondering if it's related to a specific driver or hardware vendor or the like that my 3 different computers don't have.
It jumps out at me that something like the NVIDIA 196.75 drivers which are broken and kill video cards or the like might be the sort of culprit, like if you've got a system restore point with some driver that WHQL has flagged specifically as bad (or as an invalid WHQL certificate or something) it blows away those restore points. Not exactly a graceful solution but it's probably better than killing your computer.
There are a lot of things which can effect restore points though, remaining disk space, settings, age of the restore points and so on, for all I know there could be some esoteric option there which does it.
On both 7 and vista I've found restore points super helpful (definitely not so in XP), so I'd be interested to know what the thinking at MS is about when to silently delete restore points and when not to.
Um european not american governments. In europe the governments regularly own all, or part of airlines, airports, aircraft manufacturing and so on. Either way they're on the hook. They actually do want to look like they're doing something to help the state owned whatever company on a regular basis, since that wins votes, when you're the socialist party you want to look like you're giving out money to support businesses.
I'm not sure why anyone thinks airlines wouldn't get compensated for volcanic ash. It's not anyone's fault, but with consumer protection laws in Europe a lot of these airlines (some with government ownership some without) can be on the hook for hotel fees etc. for stranded passengers who were buying 100 dollar flights but racking up hundreds of dollars in hotel fees and so on - no business can handle that well. 0 revenue, and actually *increasing* expenses, because you can't lay your staff off (unions + wanting to fly on a moments notice), you can't just refund the money to the customer you have to actually pay them for something that isn't your fault. Then it's just a matter of degree, 1% of flights every day they probably need to factor into their own spending,
And of course, if the airlines collapse that strands passengers (and they have to call in the navy to rescue them), costs jobs and ultimately isn't worth the hit to the public purse compared to the costs of bailing them out for a few days of down time. If they're government owned (even partially) the government also wants to keep it's direct investment. Then there's the whole Airbus thing, if an airline goes bankrupt it reduces the value of aircraft, and since half of Europe owns EADS (airbus + some other stuff), that's bad for their own aircraft manufacturing business.
In general governments want to bail out a business when it's cheaper than letting it go bankrupt, even the Americans, but in Europe governments are directly tied into the aeroplane, airport, air traffic etc. chain and have an even larger vested interest in not having an airline going bankrupt.
in the short term it will add value to IPv4 addresses, and organizations not using them might *gasp* make money getting rid of ones it doesn't need. That's not a bad thing. We have this problem with spectrum too, there's no particular cost in having a huge chunk idling away once you've got it. Anything which motivated more efficient utilization is good, and money creates a motivation.
A short term will drive up the cost of IPv4 addresses will, in turn, make IPv6 look much more economically viable to people who actually pay for things. As with everything else in the real wold: money makes things happen. IPv6 isn't magically cheaper than IPv4, so no one has been all that bothered about it, so either you lower the cost of IPv6 or raise the cost of IPv4, and running out of IPv4 addresses manages the latter nicely.
No, but they could reasonably compensate you for say, a week behind bars erroneously. If we can agree there is *any* amount of time they can compensate you for, and some amount of time that money simply cannot make up for, then we're merely discussing degree.
Maybe your threshold for 'not possible to compensate' is 30 years, but what about people who say well, 30 years, that's worth 3.2715 million euros to me. But 60 years, that I can't put a price on?
To be nice the standards guys even created a special unit of measure for all this base two stuff. Called binary prefixes.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_prefix. Basically it's the SI prefix with an i after it. Kibi, as Ki Mibi as Mi etc.
KB means 1000 bytes. There is no ambiguity. At all. KiB is 1024. Any other usage is wrong, and should not be tolerated. This isn't 1980.
ya but those cases, as he reasonably explains, tend to get specialized development (say scientific computing), or separate processes, or while he doesn't explain it, a lot of server stuff is embarrassingly (or close to) parallel.
I can sort of see them not having a multi-processor OS just waiting for the consumer desktop- server processors are basically cache with some processor attached, whereas desktop processors are architected differently, and who knew for sure what the mutlicore world would look like in detail (or more relevantly what it will look like with 4, 8 or 16 or whatever cores). How will those cores be connected? How symmetric/asymmetric will they be? Right now OS's are built around two big asymmetric processors (cpu and gpu) and several smaller specialized ones (networking sound etc). Some of those architecture things *could* be fairly fundamental to the design you want to use, and there's no point investing huge development time trying to build software for hardware which doesn't exist and may never exist.
I'm not sure about his proposed architecture. It doesn't sound easily backwards compatible (but I might be wrong there), and there's a certain simplicity to 'reserve one core for the OS, application developers can manage the rest of them themselves' sort of model like consoles.
And a bit of an and underhanded advert for ATI. 'Password recovery' is an inherently parallel problem that really likes the sort of math gpus do, and not so much the sort CPU's do. The ATI 5000 series are the fastest GPU's available at retail right now, doesn't take a genius to put 2 and 2 together here. Anyone who knows anything about NVIDIA's workstation parts knows they are not radical departures from their current retail chips so saying your new fancy retail part is twice as fast as the workstation version of the other guys last gen part is stating the obvious.
why would the chinese particularly care about what a guy who died 34 years ago might have actually done? Does it meaningfully change what policies they should have today? Does it change economic or job growth predictions?
And why do you think Li is a thug exactly? Every government censors content to protect the rights of a country and it's people, they may do, to varying degrees, a worse or better job of it, but the government decides what is illegal, and companies are expected to not show you illegal content. "publication bans" "ratings" "film classification board" "classified" etc. are all to some degree forms of censorship.
How much of what Gerald Ford did is still under lock and key? And how do you know, until they take it out from under lock and key?
You and the government of china may disagree on what effects the rights of china and the chinese people, but their censorship vs anyone elses is a matter of degree. They have decided that political instability is not worth the 'truth' or that the 'truth' should be buried, but not completely. See the PRC lets thousands if not millions of chinese leave the country and then come back every year, and they go places where there is less censorship, yet still it doesn't seem like they're shocked and all try and start a revolution over it. They need a small army of people to police things which are censored, and again, they obviously know what is being censored and yet aren't starting a revolution about it. So I fail to see the great outrage over china censoring things 30 years old. One would I think have a better argument with their current environmental, corruption and pro democracy protests. Those at least actually mean something right now, and people might care about it today. Whether or not a guy who died 34 years ago killed more or less people than a guy who died 62 years ago is somewhat less important to people who may wish to change how the country is run.
unless of course the chinese people believe the government when it declares something negative or corrupting. Government influence extends well beyond any single medium, and lasts far longer than the lifespan of the average search engine. Governments can shape public perception, for the better or worse, and they can shape it over decades.
Consider a similar situation in north America. Imagine a gov't body comes out and says Yahoo is doing something wildly inappropriate. Well it may be, it may be censorship, but yahoo isn't big enough, and the public naturally views yahoo with enough suspicion about it's business model (really, someone offered you 40 billion dollars for a webpage, and you didn't take it... what's going on there?) they may not question too deeply. It's not like Google is the big dog in china, if they get shut down it's playing to the base who want a ban on japanese cars because they're supposedly unsafe or who don't like the idea of 'offshoring'. To china Google is a foreign influence, and lets face it, no one with a brain trusts american corporations. I don't trust canadian corporations or chinese corporations particularly either, but I trust US corporations in my country less. If the chinese government says to the people of china google is a meddlesome foreign power they will probably be believed, and continue not using google and not shed a tear when google is turfed out of their country.
Also note that china (and lots of other relatively poor areas) have been told for decades to basically fear western corporations because they'll come in and destroy the economy, take away all the jobs etc. Admittedly we've been told almost the reverse in the west, but they are dealing with the vestiges of colonialism. China especially works hard to make sure chinese consumers are served by chinese businesses. They don't want US/Japanese DVD's, computers cars etc. they want to make their own, and make ours and then sell us ours. It's not a system which can last of course, but their perceptions are going to be pretty strongly against the west.
that's only for their 'gutted' products. Which isn't everything. They usually have one gutted that makes up the store display, and then several unopened in the back or otherwise locked up. If you buy the last in stock of an item they give you the store display and the gutted disk.
Used are usually all gutted.
This thing with newegg almost looks like they are promo boxes or mock ups that got accidentally shipped out.
or because they don't hire very many people with good ideas, and when they do, those people want things which cost money, and you can only spend money in government if it's to pander to a voting district and not to actually accomplish any sort of objective goal driven task. Of course if you want to get people who have good ideas on how to do things you also need to pay them decent salaries, which in many cases can be well over the 400k/year that the president makes or the 200k ish per year governor/provincial premiers make, and that's a political hot potato no one wants.
On top of all that, why bother? Staff want improved efficiency, but what do government managers care? Their staff levels are the same either way, their workload is the same either way, being more efficient so you can lay people off (which you can't do) or have them sit around and do nothing isn't helpful either. Most government agencies change in size at a glacial pace.
Governments are exceptionally good at wasting huge amounts of money accounting for how huge amounts of money are spent, which prevents managers having access to discretionary spending to try and improve efficiency. I bet the US government employs a total of about 35-40 million people (not all directly) (3.5 Trillion budget/13.5 trillion GDP, * 150 million working age in US), and I would bet within that there are literally millions of managers who, in the private sector would have access to much more money to improve efficiency. In government if even one of those guys is caught using the money on something politically unpalatable or just wildly inappropriate then the government brings in new measures to prevent this happening again, bad press then wastes millions accounting for the thousands some idiot spent on hookers or hammers made in China and not Kentucky.
The political football here is the challenge. Conservatives tend to view government as the enemy (it isn't), and socialists want the government to go too far the other way and own too much, and liberals are trying to balance the two. Whenever something goes wrong socialists demand more people be employed to account for how to fix it, conservatives demand everyone be fired and in the end nothing useful happens. The US system has crept towards more and more public disclosure of the specifics of expenditure, on the face of it that sounds good, but it opens up individual congressmen into being bullied to show their returns locally, and preventing agencies from paying talented experienced people to do thing which are best done with talent and experience.
Don't get me wrong, accountability and efficiency are both worthy goals but they are somewhat counter to each other, governments err too much on the side of accountability, business on the side of efficiency. Every now and then someone comes along and overhauls a system, in this regard businesses benefit much more than the US government (but not so much other federal governments). In a business you overhaul to stay successful, if someone else has reorganized and is more profitable because of it you spend the money and follow suit. Other governments tend to face this as well (eventually). If those frenchies can do X why can't we? But in the US any sort of outward inspection is often not considered at all. The perks of being the biggest and (at least temporarily) most powerful government in the world is that you don't have to listen to anyone, the problem is that if you don't eventually they'll do things better than you. Healthcare being the perfect example. The Europeans especially and the rest of the rich world in general regularly try and steal good ideas from each other. But the US, well you have to have a made in America solution to a problem well solved by someone else already. And my god, we cannot consider evidence of how and why those other systems work because that might be listening to the French and they're socialists!
The current US government deficit is both a boon to policy and a major hamper on it. I feel bad for anyone trying to make major decisions. The lack of money will force efficiencies on the system, but creating efficiencies and adding value tends to have an upfront cost which there's no way to bear.
I dunno, I can imagine a 3D gaming tapestry taking up half my wall, and I can imagine redundant computing boxes in the house for my kids (whom I haven't had yet, and must presume they will live at home in 2030) and their half wall gaming/TV tapestries. And my girlfriend will probably want something to browse her recipes and listen to music on, not to stereotype mind you, he computer can do a lot more than that now, she just seems to only care about recipes and listening to music.
A computer that costs a billion dollars to do today, 20 years from now it will presumably cost in the small number of thousands. If I had a billion dollars in computing today I can think of a whole lot of really cool, albeit frivolous things I would do.
Sept 11/01 wasn't a declaration of war. It was a single attack in a war that had been ongoing since Bin laden declared it august 23rd or thereabouts 1996, it read in part "declaration of jihad against the Americans occupying the Land of the Two Holy Mosques (Saudi Arabia); expel the heretics from the Arabian Peninsula.”
Granted lots of nutjobs of varying efficacy have declared war on the united states, Osama bin laden and Al Qaeda happen to be the largest most successful non government entity I can think of so far (at least, in 1996 AQ was a non state entity, by 2001 one could argue their alliance with the taleban made them one but that's a whole other issue).
If you read some of the stuff about AQ those guys weren't exactly fond of the US in the 80's, it was just a less present threat than the soviets in Afghanistan, and once that war was over they shifted focus. But there is some fairly complex strategic disagreement and organizational structure stuff in the various terrorist groups. They mostly agree on viewing various governments as little more than puppet states of the US (or whomever they don't like), but cannot agree on whether to go after the puppet governments first or the US. If you believe Israel, or Saudi or Russia for all it matters is nothing more than a proxy for the US government and you declare war on the proxy you can reasonably be considered, by extension to view the US as the real target of the declaration of war. On top of all that they're trying to work all the angles at once, by merging in different groups with different priorities. It means every now and then the pull off something spectacular, but most of the time an "Al qaeda supporter' is a dude hip spraying an AK in Iraq and immediately getting killed.
How big a group has to be before their declaring war warrants much consideration is a mess, and sort of underpins the article's contention that one random guy who declares war on the US and builds himself a few drones is kind of a problem. Spending millions of dollars to stop hundreds of dollars of drones would, on a purely economic basis, appear to be a win for the guy with the drones.
And the emulation would be game specific. The principle of storing your save game online is that each game (ACII, and dawn of discovery for example) would store its own data in potentially a different fashion.
Right now most DRM is applied *after* the game is done, or put another way, once you figure out DRM system A it's basically the same on every game that uses DRM system A. Revision A.1 is going to be basically the same as A, but not quite. Under the 'we own your save games' system a hacker needs to either spoof a client sending data to the server, or spoof the server for the client. Unless Ubisoft is completely brain dead (which admittedly they might be) the specific content of the client - server interactions will be different for every game. If the DRM just has the game make a save game file, and then sends it to a home server, and then load is just sending the same file back from said server in exactly the same fashion for every game that's going to be relatively easy to compromise, but as you say, if every game does something different there' s a game specific chunk of overhead in fixing it.
I can see a marketing duel coming; consumers: give me control of my data! Ubisoft: We'll save your game so you don't have to, no need to find it again or lose your progress if your computer dies! It's a bit of moving your data to the big evil corporate cloud, from the big evil corporate controlled and somewhat faulty system of your own hardware. I'm not really sure where I stand on that. I have a lot of stuff on my shelf from publishers/dev's who no longer exist, but then on PC the vast majority of it doesn't work anymore anyway. I am not however going to give Ubisoft money for a PC product released months after the console version which they are only using as an experiment in how to control my game playing.
It's not free. It's more efficient. For comparable outcomes we spend less per capita (both in absolute numbers and as a percentage of GDP). http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/hea_spe_per_per-health-spending-per-person, http://www.newswire.ca/en/releases/archive/November2009/19/c2310.html, the wiki on US healthcare spending has a nice chart of spending as a % of GDP etc. Note: I would say Norway, Luxembourg, iceland and anything below #20 on the first list cannot be meaningfully compared to the US with any ease. Luxembourg is too rich and small, iceland too small, and norway has huge mountain of oil wealth for a small country.
In some senses it is free. If you're a student, it's free. If you're poor, it's free. If you're starting a business that isn't going to make any money for 2 years, it's free. You don't pay an insurance premium, you don't risk being denied care and if you get cancer 3 times by the time you're 30 but don't have a job, you'll still be covered when you're 31 and not trying to find an insurance company. I don't pay out of pocket for it, nor do people in the UK france etc. I can pay out of pocket for extra stuff, a TV in my hospital room, coverage to get a private room in a hospital that sort of thing (and oddly dental, for which in Ontario in canada we have no coverage, the UK does though). But healthcare fees coming out of taxation means the costs are graduated, if you make a million dollars a year you pay a lot more into healthcare in Canada than your equivalent southern neighbour, but if you're poor, you pay nothing. And you don't worry about your healthcare coverage when switching jobs, or starting a new business or the like, because it's just covered. Mostly. Dental and in some cases pharmaceuticals aren't in canada, which is stupid but whatever. Is is free in the sense that how much I use the service does not particularly influence my cost. If I need 1.2 million dollars in care this year, my fee for next year does not go up, if I'm in a high risk category now, my fee does not go up.
If you go back to that first list, the UK and France have the best ideas. The UK gets decent coverage for everyone and they do it on the cheap. The NHS is an extremely cost effective method of delivering decent healthcare. The french system is, since their summer heatwave crisis that killed thousands of people, arguably the best in the world. They pay a fairly high amount as a percentage of gdp for that but they get top notch care. In practice I think the british model is better, mostly because if you set the bar for yourself too high your costs will eventually spiral out of control. If you set the bar at 'reasonable' costs will grow at reasonable rates. But that's a philosophical thing. Canada suffers enormously because we set the bar as 'better than the americans', which is setting a highjump bar around gary colemans ankles. Whenever something is wrong in canada we get away with saying well it's better than the americans. Which is true, but the French and british can do better, either better results or more cost effectively? But we're better off than the americans! At least having government control means that when healthcare goes badly (see the france thousands of people dying due to heatwave thing) politicians actually take seriously fixing it, because their jobs are on the line if they don't. The healthcare company is in the business of trying to avoid providing you service, the government is in the business of trying to provide you the most affordable service.
Minimally competent healthcare reform in the US could save a couple of thousand dollars per person, which is about 4000 per tax payer, it would mean you don't have to pay healthcare, either through your employer or privately, but you would pay higher taxes, on average. For the 40 odd million people who don't have care at all (presumably because they can't afford it), it would become free, and people for who have coverage but are poor they'd still be covered. It would hurt the chairman of GM and his 60K/mo
There's probably a psychological threshold. If most linux desktop apps are small, say a couple of hundred mebibytes, then it's going to take say 15 seconds to get the data from disk and 5 or so to load it up into memory, if you cache it in ram, and it now takes 1.5 seconds to access in memory and 5 to process (you still have to move the data to the processor) you've got from a system that takes say 21.5 seconds to load to one that takes 6.5 to load or roughly 1/3rd. Yes that's all canned off the top of my head. It's noticable, but people are tolerant of 15 seconds here or there, but it's a lot of development time to trim that down.
A really big app, (say world of warcraft), which takes 500 or 600 megs in memory - but a different 500 or 600 depending on where you are, cannot be all that effectively cached by the OS, so it's the same slow loading either way.
In that sense there's probably fairly small set of apps that users would notice and care about a feature like prefetching. It's not bad to have, but it's not critical. Probably you go and you set some thresholds, we want to load small applications that currently take one minute to load to load in 10 seconds, but applications that take 2 minutes to load, well we can't do anything with anyway, and applications that take 30 seconds to load will now load in 8 maybe, and that sort of thing. The more memory you have the easier that is, but the more memory you have the more memory big apps (like the future equivalent of world of warcraft) will use, and you're not, in terms of average load times, any further ahead.
On a server, the applications you want are usually already running, (if they aren't running odds are the server is rebooting so caching hasn't helped you a whole lot), and they need to handle caching their own data in their own way, the OS doesn't know which webpages are most likely to be served by your web server application sort of thing.