It's a WASTE of taxpayer money. America was just hit with a terrorist attack and the NSA has done nothing. 40 Million Credit and Debit cards were stolen from "Target". And you don't think that's economic terrorism??
And the good 'ol NSA has no leads, and no clue on how to solve this, despite having access to everything. The Boston Bombers? They had to set up a warehouse full of FBI agents looking at 7-11 surveillance tapes to find those guys. Facial recognition software did nothing.
The USA will be attacked again and again, and the NSA will continue to sit on its hands doing nothing. Why should they ever do anything after all? They keep getting unlimited money to do what they want in the "war on terror", but when the time comes to do something, they mysteriously won't be able to do squat.
I have a feeling a lot of your taxpayer money is going up someone's nose. Any data out there on what the head honchos at the NSA get paid? I bet their lifestyle exceeds their income, and they aren't even trying to hide it, and it will come out, it may take 20 years, but it will come out that half the money going into the NSA is being spent on hookers and blow.
I mean, hey, the end justifies the means, right? And it would be cheaper and more expedient than spying on the whole world waiting for a bit of data to connect to another bit of data that proves (and stops) nothing.
And really, we wouldn't be violating the rights of anyone any more than we are now. Right now we selectively target people we 'think' are terrorists and drone strike them. Whether they are or not is irrelevant and they can't have their day in court because we blew them up (and anyone else around them). So, what's the difference between that and just simply killing every muslim?
And hey, let's start with Saudi Arabia if you're going to quote 9/11. Plus we get free oil if you don't mind it slightly radioactive.
So how is my idea any different? In fact, my idea is better because you aren't affecting Americans, right? And only Americans "count" in this world.
Take care of your own house first before you complain about the actions of your neighbors.
The USA has plenty to feel guilty about. Stories like this tend to emphasize injustices elsewhere in the world, and IGNORE that these same injustices may be happening at home, but are under-reported.
I've tried to use Netflix on my Mac when for some reason it doesn't work on the TV. It works fine for Safari, but Chrome, which is my default browser, results in jittery video, unwatchable. Admittedly, not MacOS's fault, but annoying nevertheless.
I mean really if I have to switch browsers, when Youtube works everywhere is just... wrong...
Let's say China ships us 545,000 tons of toothpaste laced with lead, and our health inspectors reject it. Would this even be news or just another day at the Los Angeles shipping ports?
As it stands, our trade deficit with China is so great, we're coming up with creative uses for all the shipping containers being stocked 30 or 40 high -- we could build housing for the homeless from all those containers, and completely eliminate homelessness in this country, if only we had the land to put all those containers somewhere else.
Ah, the old "Hey, I don't know what this is, so it must be the cause of the fire" argument.
Of course fire investigators will point to a piece of new technology as the cause of the fire. It's easy and they are lazy. Just like videogames are the cause of all school shootings.
And before that, it was cell phones causing brain cancer, And before that it was rock and roll music causing children to misbehave.
The USA will eventually find itself alone, and without allies. And it's not just the spying, it's the drone attacks on soil with countries we are not at war with. Recently we blew up a wedding party in Yemen, killing over 13 which I'm sure included women and children. But oh no, we're not evil. We're the good guys. Uh huh.
Little by little, we are making enemies of the world, and until we change our ways, less and les of the world is going to want to do business with us because we have shown we're not trustworthy.
And to the poster who blames a 4.5 billion dollar loss on the economy to Ed Snowden, screw you. All Snowden did was CONFIRM what everyone knew already, but just couldn't prove. He will be shown to be a hero, this decade's Cindy Sheehan.
We are in the wrong, but people who wrap themselves in the flag are unwilling to admit it. And until we learn to act a little more humble, we're going to see more of this. We're making the typical over-exaggerated gestures of a failed empire. And as things get worse here, we're trying to take the rest of the world down with us.
At least half of the military robots are built by iRobot. They make plenty of money working for the government, which is how they had the extra capital to develop the Roomba. iRobot is "smarter" than Boston Dynamics because they had the business acumen to see that their R&D could also be used for consumer products.
My guess is that Google didn't buy iRobot because they are building small/clever/cute robots, while BD is making large, scary, terminator style bots. BD wants to make the soldier of the future, iRobot wants to make R2D2.
Please. I saw this on 60 Minutes and that entire pandering two-parter on Sunday night was a such a load of bullshit, I could smell it through the TV.
And this segment of it was the worst, because it made no sense. I mean, they dumbed the story down for Ma and Pa in Pigsknuckle Arkansas, but for anyone with even a hint of technical acumen, it came off as complete tripe.
Why *exactly* would China want to destroy the global economy? Such a move would hurt them more than us, because they are in a period of crazy growth, and their entire stability *depends* upon that growth or they'd have rioting.
Secondly, if a nation wanted to destroy us, why use "malware"? A better way would be to use lobbyists to force more deregulation and let us cut our own throats as we've already seen. Our own greedy bastards will happily destroy the global economy if it means 6 more dollars in *their* pockets.
The whole thing is fishy and smells of NSA desperation to look good to the average american, and paint the Chinese and Edward Snowden as bad guys we need to be afraid of so that the NSA can "protect" us, by of course, stripping us of all our rights.
If you look at the average business building in a corporate park, the area of the building is small, while the area for parking around the building is large. I believe even Walmart has figured out that installing solar panels in the parking lots is a good idea.
It keeps the cars cooler in the summer because they block some of the sunshine, during the rain they act like roofing, and during those peak hours during the daytime, they offset the cost of electricity. And with the plummeting prices of panels these days, it would be more cost effective to go that way than to install a battery set-up in the basement.
Other than Tetris, I can't think of a single game that's been ported to more platforms, and played more than DOOM has -- there are people right now, somewhere in the world still playing doom -- and I'm one of them.
What I enjoy about doom is that it's simply everywhere. I remember being at an E3, and among other new releases for the Super Nintendo (yes the 16 bit), was a DOOM cartridge. The fact that DOOM is available for practically every platform there is (although I have no bothered to confirm, I'm sure I can even play on an iPhone), one of my favorites was finding the engine for SGI machines and SUN platforms very early on -- so, yeah... you could play it on a cheap 486, or on your high-end $20,000 workstation, it was (and still is) literally everywhere.
My prediction is that regardless of what new platforms materialize in the future, some enterprising hacker will port DOOM to it, making the franchise one of the most durable in the history of videogames.
Then the 14 would only have to pay a small fine and admit no wrongdoing. Really, what they should have done was form their own bank if they wanted to steal money. I mean, look at Paypal, and they aren't even a bank!
For the "media consumption" crowd who only surf the web and watch youtube videos, then yes, perhaps the desktop is dead.
For people who CREATE anything, perform any kind of development work, do web page design, graphic design, or any kind of office work, the desktop, even if it's virtualized via thin-client hardware, will still be king.
I work on a desktop, but the main purpose of this desktop is to login to a mainframe (not kidding), that's running cobol code that goes back to the 1980's. There's millions of dollars of software investment in this system, and it's not going anywhere, even though upper management has tried to get rid of it. It simply works too well. And I'm sure I'm not alone -- I'm assuming there's billions of dollars of hardware and software that firms are hesitant to simply drop and replace if it's doing the job.
And don't even get me started on "the cloud" -- without the equivalent of cheap/ubiquitous "desktop" machine hardware out there, the cloud wouldn't be able to exist.
The desktop is dead? Hardly, and only if you're looking at a single segment of the market. That's like saying the wristwatch is dead, the wired telephone is dead, the stereo system is dead, and the TV set is dead -- all of these devices can be replaced by a single mobile device, so, consumers don't need these things either, does that mean that they are dead too?
I've learned from the news that cars are dangerous!
Meanwhile, I spend almost every weekend patching together my friend's 1972 Super Beetle, which he drives daily to work, and he takes off from every light light like he's racing the next guy regardless of whether the other guy is driving a cheap Kia or a Lambo. At this point, the challenge has become how long we can continue to keep the car going, we continue to weld, patch, bondo, repaint, fix the engine when needed, and do whatever is needed to keep it running while he's putting 18,000 miles per year on a 41-yr old car. And we live in the Northeast, where beating the rust is an on-going issue.
So 10% of software engineers are female, but, the entire list of firms listed are "within the decade", web-based firms that program mostly in Javascript.
Get into the insurance or banking businesses, or anyone that's been computing since the 1960's and you'll find those numbers are different. If we're programming Cobol, I'd have to say that almost 50% of our developers are women.
The internet used to be a cool place full of like-minded geeks.
Over the last decade or so however, the internet, and the web in particular, has morphed into a giant scam, and we're all suckers for taking part in it.
Consider even the simple act of clicking on a news story on a website; before the webpage even loads entirely, a video-ad will play, with no way to close it. And after the ad is done, the content you're looking for is 'not available' or is blocked/grey'ed-out until you sign up for the news-site's spam service that you can then never unsubscribe from.
Yes, the web is a total scam at this point, and the only winning move is not to play. Thanks Joshua.
And no, Madoff doesn't count. He wasn't a banker, AND he turned himself in -- chances are; had he waited a bit more, he could have only paid a small fine and walked away.
One of Apple's cheap Macs (the "LC"?) had a single nubus slot that took a special card that allowed you to hook up an Apple 5.25 floppy -- and had a hardware/software Apple// emulator.
These days, no mac supports any kind of floppy, even via USB -- you'd have to download disk image files to get to the software.
Seriously, this is cool and all, but, why wasn't this done over a decade ago? In fact, Apple should have done it themselves *before* ending the manufacturing of the Apple//, to inspire people to find new ways to hack this machine and utilize it in ways never intended by Woz.
It's sad that one of the best hacking platforms out there is the Raspberry Pi, and not the much simpler to figure out Apple// -- although to be fair, people are doing amazing things with the Pi, I just wish there was a popular 8-bit machine out there for the young'ns to get them started.
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It's a WASTE of taxpayer money. America was just hit with a terrorist attack and the NSA has done nothing. 40 Million Credit and Debit cards were stolen from "Target". And you don't think that's economic terrorism??
And the good 'ol NSA has no leads, and no clue on how to solve this, despite having access to everything. The Boston Bombers? They had to set up a warehouse full of FBI agents looking at 7-11 surveillance tapes to find those guys. Facial recognition software did nothing.
The USA will be attacked again and again, and the NSA will continue to sit on its hands doing nothing. Why should they ever do anything after all? They keep getting unlimited money to do what they want in the "war on terror", but when the time comes to do something, they mysteriously won't be able to do squat.
I have a feeling a lot of your taxpayer money is going up someone's nose. Any data out there on what the head honchos at the NSA get paid? I bet their lifestyle exceeds their income, and they aren't even trying to hide it, and it will come out, it may take 20 years, but it will come out that half the money going into the NSA is being spent on hookers and blow.
Nuke the crap out of the middle east.
I mean, hey, the end justifies the means, right? And it would be cheaper and more expedient than spying on the whole world waiting for a bit of data to connect to another bit of data that proves (and stops) nothing.
And really, we wouldn't be violating the rights of anyone any more than we are now. Right now we selectively target people we 'think' are terrorists and drone strike them. Whether they are or not is irrelevant and they can't have their day in court because we blew them up (and anyone else around them). So, what's the difference between that and just simply killing every muslim?
And hey, let's start with Saudi Arabia if you're going to quote 9/11. Plus we get free oil if you don't mind it slightly radioactive.
So how is my idea any different? In fact, my idea is better because you aren't affecting Americans, right? And only Americans "count" in this world.
....Will look like a certain well-known Black Cube, and come with a Magneto-Optical drive.
Take care of your own house first before you complain about the actions of your neighbors.
The USA has plenty to feel guilty about. Stories like this tend to emphasize injustices elsewhere in the world, and IGNORE that these same injustices may be happening at home, but are under-reported.
I've tried to use Netflix on my Mac when for some reason it doesn't work on the TV. It works fine for Safari, but Chrome, which is my default browser, results in jittery video, unwatchable. Admittedly, not MacOS's fault, but annoying nevertheless.
I mean really if I have to switch browsers, when Youtube works everywhere is just ... wrong...
I think I'm starting a business which will sell data on the 1% to anyone who wants it. It's time to even the odds.
Let's say China ships us 545,000 tons of toothpaste laced with lead, and our health inspectors reject it. Would this even be news or just another day at the Los Angeles shipping ports?
As it stands, our trade deficit with China is so great, we're coming up with creative uses for all the shipping containers being stocked 30 or 40 high -- we could build housing for the homeless from all those containers, and completely eliminate homelessness in this country, if only we had the land to put all those containers somewhere else.
Ah, the old "Hey, I don't know what this is, so it must be the cause of the fire" argument.
Of course fire investigators will point to a piece of new technology as the cause of the fire. It's easy and they are lazy. Just like videogames are the cause of all school shootings.
And before that, it was cell phones causing brain cancer,
And before that it was rock and roll music causing children to misbehave.
The USA will eventually find itself alone, and without allies. And it's not just the spying, it's the drone attacks on soil with countries we are not at war with. Recently we blew up a wedding party in Yemen, killing over 13 which I'm sure included women and children. But oh no, we're not evil. We're the good guys. Uh huh.
Little by little, we are making enemies of the world, and until we change our ways, less and les of the world is going to want to do business with us because we have shown we're not trustworthy.
And to the poster who blames a 4.5 billion dollar loss on the economy to Ed Snowden, screw you. All Snowden did was CONFIRM what everyone knew already, but just couldn't prove. He will be shown to be a hero, this decade's Cindy Sheehan.
We are in the wrong, but people who wrap themselves in the flag are unwilling to admit it. And until we learn to act a little more humble, we're going to see more of this. We're making the typical over-exaggerated gestures of a failed empire. And as things get worse here, we're trying to take the rest of the world down with us.
At least half of the military robots are built by iRobot. They make plenty of money working for the government, which is how they had the extra capital to develop the Roomba. iRobot is "smarter" than Boston Dynamics because they had the business acumen to see that their R&D could also be used for consumer products.
My guess is that Google didn't buy iRobot because they are building small/clever/cute robots, while BD is making large, scary, terminator style bots. BD wants to make the soldier of the future, iRobot wants to make R2D2.
Please. I saw this on 60 Minutes and that entire pandering two-parter on Sunday night was a such a load of bullshit, I could smell it through the TV.
And this segment of it was the worst, because it made no sense. I mean, they dumbed the story down for Ma and Pa in Pigsknuckle Arkansas, but for anyone with even a hint of technical acumen, it came off as complete tripe.
Why *exactly* would China want to destroy the global economy? Such a move would hurt them more than us, because they are in a period of crazy growth, and their entire stability *depends* upon that growth or they'd have rioting.
Secondly, if a nation wanted to destroy us, why use "malware"? A better way would be to use lobbyists to force more deregulation and let us cut our own throats as we've already seen. Our own greedy bastards will happily destroy the global economy if it means 6 more dollars in *their* pockets.
The whole thing is fishy and smells of NSA desperation to look good to the average american, and paint the Chinese and Edward Snowden as bad guys we need to be afraid of so that the NSA can "protect" us, by of course, stripping us of all our rights.
If you look at the average business building in a corporate park, the area of the building is small, while the area for parking around the building is large. I believe even Walmart has figured out that installing solar panels in the parking lots is a good idea.
It keeps the cars cooler in the summer because they block some of the sunshine, during the rain they act like roofing, and during those peak hours during the daytime, they offset the cost of electricity. And with the plummeting prices of panels these days, it would be more cost effective to go that way than to install a battery set-up in the basement.
Then I'm mostly composed of beer........
(and not necessarily a bad thing)
Other than Tetris, I can't think of a single game that's been ported to more platforms, and played more than DOOM has -- there are people right now, somewhere in the world still playing doom -- and I'm one of them.
What I enjoy about doom is that it's simply everywhere. I remember being at an E3, and among other new releases for the Super Nintendo (yes the 16 bit), was a DOOM cartridge. The fact that DOOM is available for practically every platform there is (although I have no bothered to confirm, I'm sure I can even play on an iPhone), one of my favorites was finding the engine for SGI machines and SUN platforms very early on -- so, yeah... you could play it on a cheap 486, or on your high-end $20,000 workstation, it was (and still is) literally everywhere.
My prediction is that regardless of what new platforms materialize in the future, some enterprising hacker will port DOOM to it, making the franchise one of the most durable in the history of videogames.
First Woman in Space : Vanetina Terechkova
First Manned Space Station : Salyut
First Lunar Orbit : Luna 10
First Venus Landing ; Venera 7
Then the 14 would only have to pay a small fine and admit no wrongdoing. Really, what they should have done was form their own bank if they wanted to steal money. I mean, look at Paypal, and they aren't even a bank!
They are all charging their phones and laptops from the provided electrical outlets!
For the "media consumption" crowd who only surf the web and watch youtube videos, then yes, perhaps the desktop is dead.
For people who CREATE anything, perform any kind of development work, do web page design, graphic design, or any kind of office work, the desktop, even if it's virtualized via thin-client hardware, will still be king.
I work on a desktop, but the main purpose of this desktop is to login to a mainframe (not kidding), that's running cobol code that goes back to the 1980's. There's millions of dollars of software investment in this system, and it's not going anywhere, even though upper management has tried to get rid of it. It simply works too well. And I'm sure I'm not alone -- I'm assuming there's billions of dollars of hardware and software that firms are hesitant to simply drop and replace if it's doing the job.
And don't even get me started on "the cloud" -- without the equivalent of cheap/ubiquitous "desktop" machine hardware out there, the cloud wouldn't be able to exist.
The desktop is dead? Hardly, and only if you're looking at a single segment of the market. That's like saying the wristwatch is dead, the wired telephone is dead, the stereo system is dead, and the TV set is dead -- all of these devices can be replaced by a single mobile device, so, consumers don't need these things either, does that mean that they are dead too?
I've learned from the news that cars are dangerous!
Meanwhile, I spend almost every weekend patching together my friend's 1972 Super Beetle, which he drives daily to work, and he takes off from every light light like he's racing the next guy regardless of whether the other guy is driving a cheap Kia or a Lambo. At this point, the challenge has become how long we can continue to keep the car going, we continue to weld, patch, bondo, repaint, fix the engine when needed, and do whatever is needed to keep it running while he's putting 18,000 miles per year on a 41-yr old car. And we live in the Northeast, where beating the rust is an on-going issue.
So 10% of software engineers are female, but, the entire list of firms listed are "within the decade", web-based firms that program mostly in Javascript.
Get into the insurance or banking businesses, or anyone that's been computing since the 1960's and you'll find those numbers are different. If we're programming Cobol, I'd have to say that almost 50% of our developers are women.
The internet used to be a cool place full of like-minded geeks.
Over the last decade or so however, the internet, and the web in particular, has morphed into a giant scam, and we're all suckers for taking part in it.
Consider even the simple act of clicking on a news story on a website; before the webpage even loads entirely, a video-ad will play, with no way to close it. And after the ad is done, the content you're looking for is 'not available' or is blocked/grey'ed-out until you sign up for the news-site's spam service that you can then never unsubscribe from.
Yes, the web is a total scam at this point, and the only winning move is not to play. Thanks Joshua.
Name a banker that's actually gone to jail.
And no, Madoff doesn't count. He wasn't a banker, AND he turned himself in -- chances are; had he waited a bit more, he could have only paid a small fine and walked away.
Because you have to start counting kids from ZERO.
Don't you guys read your own articles?
One of Apple's cheap Macs (the "LC"?) had a single nubus slot that took a special card that allowed you to hook up an Apple 5.25 floppy -- and had a hardware/software Apple // emulator.
These days, no mac supports any kind of floppy, even via USB -- you'd have to download disk image files to get to the software.
Seriously, this is cool and all, but, why wasn't this done over a decade ago? In fact, Apple should have done it themselves *before* ending the manufacturing of the Apple //, to inspire people to find new ways to hack this machine and utilize it in ways never intended by Woz.
It's sad that one of the best hacking platforms out there is the Raspberry Pi, and not the much simpler to figure out Apple // -- although to be fair, people are doing amazing things with the Pi, I just wish there was a popular 8-bit machine out there for the young'ns to get them started.