Can someone please explain to me how you can say something is "times something" when the second article is less than the first?
Not too shocking. Here in another context : this piece of wire (1 ohm) is 10 times more conductive than that one (10 ohm). That's mathematically correct when we consider that conductance is the inverse of resistance. This case is particularly convenient because conductance actually has a unit : the siemens, which is the inverse of the ohm. So we go from 1/10 siemens to 1 siemens, a regular 10 time increase. Another example : 10 times slower means 10 times more seconds per meter, but it is a unusual unit, so we divide the number or meters per second instead. Nothing wrong here.
Go even further: voting power is proportional to the amount you pay in taxes minus how much you taxpayer money you receive... Doesn't sound very democratic... Oh, I forgot the army, give them a vote per kill.
My point is that when you start deviating from the 1 person / 1 vote rule, there is a lot of potential for abuse. What we have now is far from perfect, but it is the least bad we could come up with. A benevolent dictatorship would be ideal, but it practice, it never ends well.
I have no problem imagining glass tiles resisting hail. Some windshields can resist these, and they are much larger and thinner than tiles. They also hold together after being broken.
It is not really an engineering problem. It's more about economics and aesthetics, as well as how much of a penalty there is compared to regular panels of the same size.
AFAIK, cannabis does nothing against inflammation. It doesn't seem there is a big overlap with NSAIDs like Ibuprofen. It may help reduce dependency on opioids though.
Yes, unbreakable encryption is a problem for law enforcement. And yes, they need to do something about it, because yes, criminals are using it.
Of course, unbreakable encryption is extremely valuable for plenty of reasons, it's here to stay but it doesn't mean we should ignore the problem. Police has to do its work, and it means watching people in some way or another, there is a balance with privacy that is not always easy to find. When discussing the police watching you, it is easy to think about cases where you end up arrested because you searched "bomb making" on Google, but that's ignoring the cases where you aren't arrested because the same surveillance has shown that you couldn't be the culprit. And I am not just talking about high profile "think of the children" cases. Finding who stole your car or who scammed grandma also counts.
Sure I know about government abuse, and that some of the criminals are the ones who are supposed to protect us. I also have things to hide are I don't like being watched any more than you do. However, I think extremism will get us nowhere. We have established that strong encryption is a must have, now what are the solutions to the problem of crime fighting? The better the answer, the more seriously we will be taken by those who want to demonize encryption.
AFAIK, most of the issues people have with Windows 10 are about policies and the GUI. And on these aspects, is is reasonable to consider Windows 7 superior.
On the core technical aspects however, most people seem to agree that Windows 10, and even 8 are superior to 7.
In general, our experience is that Variant 1 and Variant 3 mitigations have minimal performance impact, while Variant 2 remediation, including OS and microcode, has a performance impact.
Spectre is Variant 1 and 2. Meltdown is Variant 3.
AMD original response is that there is a "near zero" risk of exploit for variant 2 and a "zero" risk for variant 3. Notice the difference.
And from a link page on the Microsoft website:
Microsoft is aware of a new publicly disclosed class of vulnerabilities that are called “speculative execution side-channel attacks” that affect many modern processors and operating systems, including Intel, AMD, and ARM.
So it is very likely that performance impacting mitigations are in place for AMD CPUs too. In fact, they are currently working with AMD on the issue, so it is probably too early to tell.
What makes you think Intel knew that a year ago? All Intel CPUs with speculative execution are affected by Meltdown, and all CPUs with speculative execution, including those by AMD and ARM are vulnerable to Spectre. Intel discovering that a year before Google would be a coincidence. It is not just a bug, it is a fundamental issue in the way all modern CPUs are designed.
Yeah, there are similarities but it is actually completely different, both in philosophy and magnitude.
First, besides a few bleeding edge web apps (pun not intended), the vast majority of websites work on any recent browser. The situation is much better in that regard than it was before. In fact most headaches come more from compatibility between different versions within the same family rather than between the latest version of different families.
And unlike Microsoft in the IE6 days, Google actually wants other browsers to be compatible. Google doesn't make money off Chrome, they make money when you use their online services, they are perfectly happy to have Firefox users too, they even pay good money to Mozilla for it. Microsoft was in the opposite situation: they make money by selling you the browser (as a component of Windows), they broke compatibility deliberately so that you needed to pay for Windows/IE in order to access a significant part of the web.
The reason Google makes Chrome is to push standards. When they want to add a feature that is advantageous to them (ex: lowers their bandwidth requirements) they don't have to beg standards governing bodies and other browsers developers. They just implement it in Chrome and encourage others to do the same.
I don't expect your dystopic scenario to happen in the near future. The first reason is technical. Fixing diseases is the easiest thing we can do with gene editing. Healthy individuals are much harder to deal with because you not only have to edit in the desirable trait but also keep the rest healthy. And it is even harder with general traits like strength and behavior since there is no specific gene for these. The second reason is that we don't need gene editing for creating "castes". Selective breeding is very effective and has been used successfully since the discovery of agriculture, but not much on humans. Gene editing won't make the situation much different.
Where did you see that Slashdot is okay with censorship in Germany? And there is nothing about exporting German law to other countries. It is not about writing posts, it is about publishing. And posts that are illegal in Germany will probably just end up being hidden from German IPs. It already happens with Google search results.
Well, they are, but it is like saying that if you buy an iPhone, you are buying into slavery and child labor. It is just too hard to find a complex product that doesn't involve any of these at some point.
They are just buying sex, and unfortunately, the market is dominated by trafficking. The legal system and stigma associated with prostitution doesn't give much choice.
There is nothing asm.js and emscripen do not that you regular JS can't do. asm.js is just a subset of JS that is particularly well optimized and emscripen is just a code translator.
Safety features built into Javascript like sandboxing and safe memory management stay intact. Malware designed to run natively won't work in a Javascript VM no matter how much emscripen and asm.js you use.
And of course malware is software, so tools that help software developers help malware developers, and also anti-malware developers. Nothing special here.
You mean a self signed certificate? Browsers hate these even more than plain http. If you mean creating your own root of trust, it is not easy for the layman. And you can't make it too easy, otherwise, it will be exploited.
I don't know if it is intentional but it is a nice little fallacy that you have here. "not an act of a friendly government" sounds like "the act of a hostile government" but it may actually just mean that it is not from a government at all.
The thing with superchargers is not that they are penalizing heavy use. They are restricting a particular kind of use. Heavy personal use is OK, light commercial use is not. A neutral rule would be that if you exceed a specific number of kWh, you cannot use superchargers during peak times, or are limited to some specific spots. But beside that, a joule is a joule. It is similar to the "no tethering" rule for mobile internet. Sure, tethering is generally heavy use but banning the practice instead of using quotas or standard QoS is definitely not neutral.
Finally, the rule makes a lot of sense to me. If superchargers are getting contested and if a significant fraction are used by a small percentage of users, it's reasonable to makes rules to ensure they are more readily available.
By the same logic it makes a lot of sense for an ISP to make rules about how the internet should be used in order to prevent a small percentage of users from using too much resources. However, in this case, there are laws against it... oh wait.
ASIC mining is not entirely a bad thing. I've seen somewhere that having something like half ASIC, half general purpose computers would be the ideal situation for a proof-of-work mining network.
The good thing with ASIC/specialized mining is that it requires a significant investment in something that can't really be used for anything else. It stabilizes the network. Using general purpose computers (spare CPU/GPU cycles) is good for decentralization, but it also mean that the vast majority of the network have little incentive to keep things running if their currency loses momentum, because there is no real investment, just running costs.
As for burning energy, this is no different. Mining stops being interesting when energy costs becomes higher than rewards, having that cost distributed around the world rather than concentrated in huge mining rigs doesn't change that.
New ISP service plans (on top of what you're already paying)
I think that where you are wrong. Net neutrality is not a way to prevent price gouging. It is to prevent preferential treatment and anti-competitive practices.
In fact, in most cases, net neutrality violation are about offering something for free rather than making you pay what was previously free. I think a more realistic change would be : Your service plan now comes with unlimited Netflix! (we also halved your data cap, but because Netflix doesn't count against it, you won't need the other half, right?).
The 1% love space. Elon Musk is the most famous example now.
Also, controlling space is a good thing if your goal is to blow up other governments. The closest thing we have to space weapon right now are ICBMs, these are so effective that the only way to defend against them is to strike first. Space exploration benefits a lot from the "blow up other governments" budget.
Yes, they care, because they don't own the last mile. Google wants Comcast users to watch YouTube. And they don't want Comcast to use their status as an ISP against them.
In this case, it is reality. Power lines are everywhere in Japan. It is common for backgrounds in anime to be almost photographs of actual places. When it come to places, anime is a very accurate depiction of real life Japan. Of course, that's assuming the setting is Japan, present day, present time, hahahaha.
AFAIK, they didn't block the web browser, you can still go to youtube.com and watch all the videos (and ads). What they blocked was the app, Amazon responded by spoofing a web browser, probably using the same technique as NewPipe, and this is what they blacklisted.
Slashdot Mirror
Can someone please explain to me how you can say something is "times something" when the second article is less than the first?
Not too shocking.
Here in another context : this piece of wire (1 ohm) is 10 times more conductive than that one (10 ohm). That's mathematically correct when we consider that conductance is the inverse of resistance. This case is particularly convenient because conductance actually has a unit : the siemens, which is the inverse of the ohm. So we go from 1/10 siemens to 1 siemens, a regular 10 time increase.
Another example : 10 times slower means 10 times more seconds per meter, but it is a unusual unit, so we divide the number or meters per second instead. Nothing wrong here.
Go even further: voting power is proportional to the amount you pay in taxes minus how much you taxpayer money you receive... Doesn't sound very democratic... Oh, I forgot the army, give them a vote per kill.
My point is that when you start deviating from the 1 person / 1 vote rule, there is a lot of potential for abuse. What we have now is far from perfect, but it is the least bad we could come up with. A benevolent dictatorship would be ideal, but it practice, it never ends well.
I have no problem imagining glass tiles resisting hail. Some windshields can resist these, and they are much larger and thinner than tiles. They also hold together after being broken.
It is not really an engineering problem. It's more about economics and aesthetics, as well as how much of a penalty there is compared to regular panels of the same size.
AFAIK, cannabis does nothing against inflammation. It doesn't seem there is a big overlap with NSAIDs like Ibuprofen.
It may help reduce dependency on opioids though.
Yes, unbreakable encryption is a problem for law enforcement. And yes, they need to do something about it, because yes, criminals are using it.
Of course, unbreakable encryption is extremely valuable for plenty of reasons, it's here to stay but it doesn't mean we should ignore the problem. Police has to do its work, and it means watching people in some way or another, there is a balance with privacy that is not always easy to find. When discussing the police watching you, it is easy to think about cases where you end up arrested because you searched "bomb making" on Google, but that's ignoring the cases where you aren't arrested because the same surveillance has shown that you couldn't be the culprit. And I am not just talking about high profile "think of the children" cases. Finding who stole your car or who scammed grandma also counts.
Sure I know about government abuse, and that some of the criminals are the ones who are supposed to protect us. I also have things to hide are I don't like being watched any more than you do. However, I think extremism will get us nowhere. We have established that strong encryption is a must have, now what are the solutions to the problem of crime fighting? The better the answer, the more seriously we will be taken by those who want to demonize encryption.
Dinosaur technology, literally.
AFAIK, most of the issues people have with Windows 10 are about policies and the GUI. And on these aspects, is is reasonable to consider Windows 7 superior.
On the core technical aspects however, most people seem to agree that Windows 10, and even 8 are superior to 7.
No mention of AMD but :
From TFA:
In general, our experience is that Variant 1 and Variant 3 mitigations have minimal performance impact, while Variant 2 remediation, including OS and microcode, has a performance impact.
Spectre is Variant 1 and 2. Meltdown is Variant 3.
AMD original response is that there is a "near zero" risk of exploit for variant 2 and a "zero" risk for variant 3. Notice the difference.
And from a link page on the Microsoft website:
Microsoft is aware of a new publicly disclosed class of vulnerabilities that are called “speculative execution side-channel attacks” that affect many modern processors and operating systems, including Intel, AMD, and ARM.
So it is very likely that performance impacting mitigations are in place for AMD CPUs too. In fact, they are currently working with AMD on the issue, so it is probably too early to tell.
What makes you think Intel knew that a year ago?
All Intel CPUs with speculative execution are affected by Meltdown, and all CPUs with speculative execution, including those by AMD and ARM are vulnerable to Spectre. Intel discovering that a year before Google would be a coincidence. It is not just a bug, it is a fundamental issue in the way all modern CPUs are designed.
Yeah, there are similarities but it is actually completely different, both in philosophy and magnitude.
First, besides a few bleeding edge web apps (pun not intended), the vast majority of websites work on any recent browser. The situation is much better in that regard than it was before. In fact most headaches come more from compatibility between different versions within the same family rather than between the latest version of different families.
And unlike Microsoft in the IE6 days, Google actually wants other browsers to be compatible. Google doesn't make money off Chrome, they make money when you use their online services, they are perfectly happy to have Firefox users too, they even pay good money to Mozilla for it.
Microsoft was in the opposite situation: they make money by selling you the browser (as a component of Windows), they broke compatibility deliberately so that you needed to pay for Windows/IE in order to access a significant part of the web.
The reason Google makes Chrome is to push standards. When they want to add a feature that is advantageous to them (ex: lowers their bandwidth requirements) they don't have to beg standards governing bodies and other browsers developers. They just implement it in Chrome and encourage others to do the same.
I don't expect your dystopic scenario to happen in the near future.
The first reason is technical. Fixing diseases is the easiest thing we can do with gene editing. Healthy individuals are much harder to deal with because you not only have to edit in the desirable trait but also keep the rest healthy. And it is even harder with general traits like strength and behavior since there is no specific gene for these.
The second reason is that we don't need gene editing for creating "castes". Selective breeding is very effective and has been used successfully since the discovery of agriculture, but not much on humans. Gene editing won't make the situation much different.
Where did you see that Slashdot is okay with censorship in Germany?
And there is nothing about exporting German law to other countries. It is not about writing posts, it is about publishing. And posts that are illegal in Germany will probably just end up being hidden from German IPs. It already happens with Google search results.
Well, they are, but it is like saying that if you buy an iPhone, you are buying into slavery and child labor. It is just too hard to find a complex product that doesn't involve any of these at some point.
They are just buying sex, and unfortunately, the market is dominated by trafficking. The legal system and stigma associated with prostitution doesn't give much choice.
There is nothing asm.js and emscripen do not that you regular JS can't do. asm.js is just a subset of JS that is particularly well optimized and emscripen is just a code translator.
Safety features built into Javascript like sandboxing and safe memory management stay intact. Malware designed to run natively won't work in a Javascript VM no matter how much emscripen and asm.js you use.
And of course malware is software, so tools that help software developers help malware developers, and also anti-malware developers. Nothing special here.
You mean a self signed certificate? Browsers hate these even more than plain http.
If you mean creating your own root of trust, it is not easy for the layman. And you can't make it too easy, otherwise, it will be exploited.
This isn't an act of a friendly government
Obviously...
I don't know if it is intentional but it is a nice little fallacy that you have here. "not an act of a friendly government" sounds like "the act of a hostile government" but it may actually just mean that it is not from a government at all.
The thing with superchargers is not that they are penalizing heavy use. They are restricting a particular kind of use. Heavy personal use is OK, light commercial use is not.
A neutral rule would be that if you exceed a specific number of kWh, you cannot use superchargers during peak times, or are limited to some specific spots. But beside that, a joule is a joule.
It is similar to the "no tethering" rule for mobile internet. Sure, tethering is generally heavy use but banning the practice instead of using quotas or standard QoS is definitely not neutral.
Finally, the rule makes a lot of sense to me. If superchargers are getting contested and if a significant fraction are used by a small percentage of users, it's reasonable to makes rules to ensure they are more readily available.
By the same logic it makes a lot of sense for an ISP to make rules about how the internet should be used in order to prevent a small percentage of users from using too much resources.
However, in this case, there are laws against it... oh wait.
ASIC mining is not entirely a bad thing. I've seen somewhere that having something like half ASIC, half general purpose computers would be the ideal situation for a proof-of-work mining network.
The good thing with ASIC/specialized mining is that it requires a significant investment in something that can't really be used for anything else. It stabilizes the network. Using general purpose computers (spare CPU/GPU cycles) is good for decentralization, but it also mean that the vast majority of the network have little incentive to keep things running if their currency loses momentum, because there is no real investment, just running costs.
As for burning energy, this is no different. Mining stops being interesting when energy costs becomes higher than rewards, having that cost distributed around the world rather than concentrated in huge mining rigs doesn't change that.
New ISP service plans (on top of what you're already paying)
I think that where you are wrong.
Net neutrality is not a way to prevent price gouging. It is to prevent preferential treatment and anti-competitive practices.
In fact, in most cases, net neutrality violation are about offering something for free rather than making you pay what was previously free. I think a more realistic change would be :
Your service plan now comes with unlimited Netflix! (we also halved your data cap, but because Netflix doesn't count against it, you won't need the other half, right?).
The 1% love space. Elon Musk is the most famous example now.
Also, controlling space is a good thing if your goal is to blow up other governments. The closest thing we have to space weapon right now are ICBMs, these are so effective that the only way to defend against them is to strike first. Space exploration benefits a lot from the "blow up other governments" budget.
Yes, they care, because they don't own the last mile.
Google wants Comcast users to watch YouTube. And they don't want Comcast to use their status as an ISP against them.
A rope?
ADSL works over wet string, but it doesn't mean that a rope is the best way to get broadband internet access, neutral or not.
In this case, it is reality. Power lines are everywhere in Japan.
It is common for backgrounds in anime to be almost photographs of actual places. When it come to places, anime is a very accurate depiction of real life Japan. Of course, that's assuming the setting is Japan, present day, present time, hahahaha.
AFAIK, they didn't block the web browser, you can still go to youtube.com and watch all the videos (and ads).
What they blocked was the app, Amazon responded by spoofing a web browser, probably using the same technique as NewPipe, and this is what they blacklisted.