And if the resupply ship has an incident that somehow prevents its contents from being usable if/when it arrives at the rendezvous, the burn to insert it into Mars orbit fails perhaps, what's the fallback plan going to be? The parameters of a manned Mars mission with current technology pretty much dictate that we'd need to construct and outfit a suitably sized vessel in LEO, meaning bringing such things as landing modules, Mars rovers, supplies etc., up to the craft in multiple launches during construction. That's a lot of mass to LEO, just for the mechanical side of things, so fitting a couple of tons worth of food and other supplies probably isn't going to be a major problem by comparison.
I'm guessing that NASA has done the math and figured out that it's easier, and possibly cheaper, to send all the food up to LEO and then transfer it to Mars in one go along with the astronauts than it is to engage in multiple interplanetary transfers, each with an orbital rendezvous and risk of failure.
Sssh! On the off-chance that he manages to win the case over the licensing of digital music, then there would be a clear legal precedent for digitally distributed TV shows and movies too. While the movie business might lag behind the music industry in terms of digital distribution, it is slowly getting there and some of us would like to actually own, as opposed to "rent" or "license", our digital media. Unless Bruce has the world's largest music collection by a considerable margin, he must know that legal fees are going to cost him more than the collection is worth, meaning this is about the principle of the thing, and he's got the money to take it quite some way. I'm getting some popcorn in; this could be the best thing to come out of Hollywood for years.
Sure, yet it didn't. Reading between the lines, and seeing phrases like "multiple drives", "attached to PC", "last decade", and I think it safe to say that we are most definitely not talking about about a reasonably modern storage system that can do 100MB/s, or it wouldn't have taken a week for the first pass. It seems much more likely that the poster has a whole bunch of external backup drives, most probably USB2, hence their first attempt was probably seriously I/O bound. That means doing as much of the de-duplication as possible without reading in the raw data, just the file tables, and and starting with the larger files so that you can move what ever is left over for the final pass that will need the files CRC'd (or hashed) onto the fastest available media.
No. No. No. Blindly CRCing every file is probably what took so long on the first pass and is a terribly inefficient way of de-duplicating files.
There is absolutely no point in generating CRCs of files unless they match on some other, simpler to compare characteristic like file size. The trick is to break the problem apart into smaller chunks. Start with the very large files, they exact size break to use it'll depend on the data set, but as the poster mentioned video file say everything over 1GB to start. Chances are you can fully de-dupe your very large files manually based on nothing more than a visual inspection of names and file sizes in little more time than it takes to find them all in the first place. You can then exclude those files from further checks, and more importantly, from CRC generation.
After that, try and break the problem down into smaller chunks. Whether you are sorting on size, name or CRC, it's quicker to do so when you only have a few hundred thousand files rather than several million. Maybe do another size constrained search; 512MB-1GB, say. Or if you have them, look for duplicated backups files in the form of ZIP files, or whatever archive format(s), you are using based on their extension - that also saves you having to expand and examine the contents of multiple archive files. Similarly, do a de-dupe of just the video files by extensions as these should again lend themselves to rapid manual sorting without having to generate CRCs for many GB of data. Another grouping to consider might be to at least try and get all of the website data, or as much of is as you can, into one place and de-dupe that, and consider whether you really need multiple archival copies of a site, or whether just the latest/final revision will do.
By the time you've done all that, including moving the stuff that you know is unique out of the way and into a better filing structure as you go, the remainder should be much more manageable for a single final pass. Scan the lot, identify duplicates based on something simple like the file size and, ideally, manually get your de-dupe tool to CRC only those groups of identically sized files that you can't easily tell apart like bunches of identically sized word processor or image files with cryptic file names.
That sounds like the work of William Dobelle, who was probably the true pioneer in the field of bionic vision. However, Dobelle's subject, "Jerry", needed a device consisting of external glasses, a camera, a computer on a waistband and a neural impact to achieve the equivalent of 20/400 vision where as this is (mostly) embedded in a synthetic eye on the user-side with a requirement for some external equipment in the lab. The size of the lab equipment isn't provided though, so it may not even be portable.
Given that Dobelle's device was built with technology available in 2001 it seems a little disingenuous to me to claim this is a "world's first" when the only real advance is that they have effectively moved the hardware from Dobelle's pair of glasses into a prosthetic eyeball. Especially so, given that the device as a whole is still some way behind Dobelle's, and may not even be portable for quite some time while the solution is developed. Still, it's early days yet, and at least their patients are not going to risk being assaulted if they try and buy a Big Mac...
I definitely don't look on grinding as an aspect of gaming that has no real world analog. While the implementation varies from game to game, it can almost always be looked upon as akin to saving up for what you want, which definitely has real world parallels - especially if you equate things like optional side missions to volunteering for overtime and so on. Sure, you can 'grind' at a job for 10 years and still be laid off, to use the example given in the article, but you will still have been earning during those 10 years and will have probably put away some cash for stuff you wanted; cars, gadgets, a home, holidays, etc. Grinding in a game is no different, only the stuff that you are saving up for is more focused on the needs of the game world than real life; abilities, vehicles, weapons, etc., and just as in real life if you stop grinding for whatever reason then you are going to find it a little harder to acquire/retain those trinkets.
Doesn't sound likely to me. The most likely outcome of an appeals process with an obviously biased jury would be for the Court of Appeal to declare a mistrial and pass the case back down to District Court for a do-over. In otherwords you are right back to square one, only both sides have now shown their cards. Other than the lawyers getting paid for a lot more hours, I don't see much benefit for anyone in that circumstance. Well, unless Samsung thought there that was no way they could prevail and were just trying to drag things out as long as possible in order to get non-infringing products to market and render the eventual verdict moot.
With hindsight, perhaps, but Samsung's legal team had their chance to evict him from the jury back in July when the jury was selected, so either they missed the chance or decided that there was a greater risk of pro-Apple bias from another juror and evicted someone else instead. From what I recall of the process there were a lot of potential jurors with a potential bias towards Apple (knowing Apple employees, owning Apple hardware, etc.) and Samsung couldn't get rid of them all, just as Apple couldn't get rid of the jurors that has similar potential bias towards Android/Samsung. I think it more likely that Samsung's legal team thought that as an electrical engineer and patent holder he might have a better grasp of their case and gambled that he might tip the balance more in their favour than in Apples'. If so it was a bad call, that's all.
IANAL, etc., but while they might have assumed that there would be an appeal - it was pretty much a given, regardless of the result, really - but it's not supposed to matter. One of their obligations as jurors is to set their personal opinions aside and provide both sides with a fair trial. If they can be shown to have failed to do that, then the only fair and legal way forward is to throw the entire thing out and start over from scratch with a new jury.
There are generally two way of appealing a verdict; attacking the opposing legal team (e.g. withholding and/or misrepresenting evidence), and attacking the court (e.g. failure to follow procedure, clear bias). I'm guessing Samsung's legal team will go mostly for the latter. Not withstanding the rulings from Judge Koh are heavily in Apple's favour, particularly in the case of denying some of their evidence (potential bias), there is a growing sentiment in the press that the jury badly failed in their duties, with the clear failure to sanity check their rulings against their penalties as Exhibit A.
My prediction; successful appeal from Samsung on grounds of a mis-trial then back to District Court for a do-over and, no doubt, subsequent appeals and counter appeals... It's going to be a loooong time before we can stick a fork in this one.
... and there's a potential huge opportunity for Samsung's marketing department here. As seen here, a court has just effectively ruled that Samsung's products are equivalent to Apple's. So, other than the Apple logo and brand name, why would you want an iThing when you can have the Samsung equivalent for any from a few tens of bucks to several hundred bucks less? After all, according to a US District Court, they are now essentially the same thing!
The trick (of course) would be for Samsung to pull off the marketing campaign without being found in contempt of court or getting their products pulled from the shelves...
I don't doubt that this is going to go through the upper reaches of legal system sooner or later, but initially at least, I think the solution is probably more in your second sentence than the first; non-vaccinated kids are putting other kids at risk, so perhaps the schools and local authorities need to start thinking about this in terms of risk and liability. Say one of the non-vaccinated kids is shown to have introduced a serious illness into a class, which then rips through the non-vaccinated pupils in that class and probably also picks up a few of the vaccinated ones too since vaccination isn't always 100% effective. If fatalities and/or life-changing debilities result it's probably just a matter of time before someone decides to sue their school board for gross negligence in failing to adequately protect little Johnny from what ails/ailed him, regardless of whether little Johnny was vaccinated or not.
Not a lot a school is going to be able to prevent that from happening, particularly since some particularly nasty diseases are contageous before the symptoms become visible. Segregating the non-vaccinated kids individually clearly isn't going to be viable, so that really just leaves a choice between a school insisting on its pupils being vaccinated or them being unable to attend. Of course, neither of those options are likely to be palatable to the parents who strongly believe in the non-vaccination of their kids, even if the school provides them with some suitably frank educational material, so the courts are still going to get involved.
Well, OP didn't actually say which aspect ratio would be preferred, although I'd guess that more vertical real estate is extremely likely as I also find 16:9 to be somewhat awkward for working on. Despite widescreen monitors being commonplace, GUIs and applications still tend to be designed with a 4:3 ratio in mind, with menus and toolbars across the top, which on widescreen displays leaves a letterbox proportioned working area that just looks "wrong" to me. When word processing, even with two pages side by side, that means there's usually far too much space wasted horizontally, and if you prefer to have your documents one above the other then it's even worse. Full screen spreadsheets are more of a mixed bag depending on which direction the data primarily extends to; if you have a large vertically orientated spreadsheet the extra scrolling can soon add up. After that, it gets a little more application specific, depending on the layout of toolbars and so on, but generally I'd go with more vertical space than 16:9 for work every time.
Now for leisure apps, on the otherhand - viewing movies and playing first person perspective games - then the narrower aspect ratios make more sense to me as they provide a more cinematic experience and help cut down on distractions in your peripheral vision respectively. Since this standard is being driven by the cinema and broadcast industries, it's pretty obvious where their priorities are going to lie.
Re:Notify ISP's to Notify Infected Customers?
on
Inside the Grum Botnet
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Based on the experiences of the DNS Changer Working Group trying to get ISPs to notify their infected users of the imminent demise of the substitute DNS Changer DNS servers, I'd say it is unlikely to work. The sad fact is that many ISPs (and there would be a *lot* of ISPs with hosts on a typical botnet) simply don't give a crap at the best of times, let alone when suggesting they take a course of action that would entail costs - postage of letters, support calls, setting up a sandbox for infected users, etc.
Now? Not so much. But since it's a fairly obvious method of making the Windows 8 UI more palatable, I'd expect to see them become much more common than they are now once Windows 8 is shipping and especially so on laptops where your fingertips are only a short distance from the screen anyway and you can't just keep the screen from your previous PC. I wouldn't expect a huge uptake but more than enough to ensure that touch is going to at least be an option, if not the default, on pretty much every new PC model offered by the time Windows 9 comes around.
You think Microsoft gives a damn which version of their desktop OS corporates use? Get real! All they care about it that they do use a version of their OS, hopefully in order to run MS Office and other MS applications as well, and not someone else's OS. Since pretty much any corporate with an MS desktop deployment that matters is now on MS's Software Assurance scheme they essentially have the revenue guaranteed already, no matter what version of Windows they decide to deploy.
Factor in what happened with XP/Vista on the corporate desktop and there might even be a little bit of sense here. Forcing the new UI down home user's throats, whether they want it on the desktop or not, increases market penetration and user awareness, plus it helps drive sales of Windows 8 tablets and phones, although to what extent remains to be seen. By the time Windows 9 comes along, touch screens on the desktop should be fairly commonplace, users will be familiar with the new UI, and there will hopefully be plenty of business apps available to run on it. Anyone care to bet whether Windows 7 will get EOL'd not too long after Windows 9 SP1 ships?
Yeah, I'm skeptical too and find it somewhat hard to believe the story hasn't come out before now. Still, MIT was responsible for the trajectories, which was why I suggested it as a possibilty for there being some truth behind what is quite likely an urban myth. Basic orbital mechanics would dictate a lot of the flight path options, so unless there was something specific to do with the explosion and its aftermath, I can't see much room for MIT to actually do anything so significant in that area.
Tough break for the Iranian people, but like other countries with draconian Internet access policies I suspect that a way will be found. As Cuba's government found out; you should never underestimate the ability of large numbers of USB sticks gifted by benefactors to facilitate the free flow of restricted information; it just takes a little longer, that's all. For the rest of us though, this is excellent news. When the next cyber-weapon gets loose on the the Iranian "Halal-net", or whatever the regime is referring to it as this week, we can sleep easy knowing that our industrial control systems are already air-gapped from the Iranian ones. With that element of risk removed, I suspect the next attack on Iranian infrastructure probably isn't going to be quite so "restrained" as the last few have been.
That was my first thought too, but maybe there is something behind this. The slingshot might have been in the book, but that was before the oxygen tank blew and the possibility that the astronauts might suffocate on their own CO2 before they made it back to Earth became an issue. It's fairly well documented that there was a lot of debate and slide-ruling over whether to proceed with the slingshot or that an abort and a quick return might be the only way to get the astronauts back before they ran out of air. My guess is that the MIT student, if they existed at all, came up with some math that proved that the abort/return approach simply wasn't going to work for some reason (unable to achieve a viable angle for a sucessful reentry, perhaps) and that at least with the slingshot there was a chance.
I think the credibility of that security audit has just been seriously undermined given the recent revelations that Huawei's routers are riddled with security problems. GCHQ was supposed to be auditing these things to ensure that they were fit for use on the UK's national infrastructure; things like 3G/LTE networks, airports, highways, powerstations, railways, and so on. So, which is it? Either they failed to find the vulnerabilities, even with the advantage of access that Felix Lindner presumably didn't have when he found the vulnerabilities, and so the audit is worthless. Alternatively, GCHQ found them and decided it was better to risk any part of the UK's national infrastructure that used Huawei routers on the off chance that the UK government might be able to use the exploits against a foreign infrastructure in, say, Africa, China, or the Middle East where Huawei has a fair sized market presence.
Then again, they might have found the vulnerabilities, pretended they hadn't for the look of the thing, and any sensitive tender that might end up utilising Huawei equipment would get a discreet visit from someone senior at Cheltenham or Whitehall to advise them that, just maybe, one of the other tenderers might be a "better choice" for being the successful bidder...
Slashdot Mirror
And if the resupply ship has an incident that somehow prevents its contents from being usable if/when it arrives at the rendezvous, the burn to insert it into Mars orbit fails perhaps, what's the fallback plan going to be? The parameters of a manned Mars mission with current technology pretty much dictate that we'd need to construct and outfit a suitably sized vessel in LEO, meaning bringing such things as landing modules, Mars rovers, supplies etc., up to the craft in multiple launches during construction. That's a lot of mass to LEO, just for the mechanical side of things, so fitting a couple of tons worth of food and other supplies probably isn't going to be a major problem by comparison.
I'm guessing that NASA has done the math and figured out that it's easier, and possibly cheaper, to send all the food up to LEO and then transfer it to Mars in one go along with the astronauts than it is to engage in multiple interplanetary transfers, each with an orbital rendezvous and risk of failure.
Sssh! On the off-chance that he manages to win the case over the licensing of digital music, then there would be a clear legal precedent for digitally distributed TV shows and movies too. While the movie business might lag behind the music industry in terms of digital distribution, it is slowly getting there and some of us would like to actually own, as opposed to "rent" or "license", our digital media. Unless Bruce has the world's largest music collection by a considerable margin, he must know that legal fees are going to cost him more than the collection is worth, meaning this is about the principle of the thing, and he's got the money to take it quite some way. I'm getting some popcorn in; this could be the best thing to come out of Hollywood for years.
Sure, yet it didn't. Reading between the lines, and seeing phrases like "multiple drives", "attached to PC", "last decade", and I think it safe to say that we are most definitely not talking about about a reasonably modern storage system that can do 100MB/s, or it wouldn't have taken a week for the first pass. It seems much more likely that the poster has a whole bunch of external backup drives, most probably USB2, hence their first attempt was probably seriously I/O bound. That means doing as much of the de-duplication as possible without reading in the raw data, just the file tables, and and starting with the larger files so that you can move what ever is left over for the final pass that will need the files CRC'd (or hashed) onto the fastest available media.
No. No. No. Blindly CRCing every file is probably what took so long on the first pass and is a terribly inefficient way of de-duplicating files.
There is absolutely no point in generating CRCs of files unless they match on some other, simpler to compare characteristic like file size. The trick is to break the problem apart into smaller chunks. Start with the very large files, they exact size break to use it'll depend on the data set, but as the poster mentioned video file say everything over 1GB to start. Chances are you can fully de-dupe your very large files manually based on nothing more than a visual inspection of names and file sizes in little more time than it takes to find them all in the first place. You can then exclude those files from further checks, and more importantly, from CRC generation.
After that, try and break the problem down into smaller chunks. Whether you are sorting on size, name or CRC, it's quicker to do so when you only have a few hundred thousand files rather than several million. Maybe do another size constrained search; 512MB-1GB, say. Or if you have them, look for duplicated backups files in the form of ZIP files, or whatever archive format(s), you are using based on their extension - that also saves you having to expand and examine the contents of multiple archive files. Similarly, do a de-dupe of just the video files by extensions as these should again lend themselves to rapid manual sorting without having to generate CRCs for many GB of data. Another grouping to consider might be to at least try and get all of the website data, or as much of is as you can, into one place and de-dupe that, and consider whether you really need multiple archival copies of a site, or whether just the latest/final revision will do.
By the time you've done all that, including moving the stuff that you know is unique out of the way and into a better filing structure as you go, the remainder should be much more manageable for a single final pass. Scan the lot, identify duplicates based on something simple like the file size and, ideally, manually get your de-dupe tool to CRC only those groups of identically sized files that you can't easily tell apart like bunches of identically sized word processor or image files with cryptic file names.
That sounds like the work of William Dobelle, who was probably the true pioneer in the field of bionic vision. However, Dobelle's subject, "Jerry", needed a device consisting of external glasses, a camera, a computer on a waistband and a neural impact to achieve the equivalent of 20/400 vision where as this is (mostly) embedded in a synthetic eye on the user-side with a requirement for some external equipment in the lab. The size of the lab equipment isn't provided though, so it may not even be portable.
Given that Dobelle's device was built with technology available in 2001 it seems a little disingenuous to me to claim this is a "world's first" when the only real advance is that they have effectively moved the hardware from Dobelle's pair of glasses into a prosthetic eyeball. Especially so, given that the device as a whole is still some way behind Dobelle's, and may not even be portable for quite some time while the solution is developed. Still, it's early days yet, and at least their patients are not going to risk being assaulted if they try and buy a Big Mac...
I definitely don't look on grinding as an aspect of gaming that has no real world analog. While the implementation varies from game to game, it can almost always be looked upon as akin to saving up for what you want, which definitely has real world parallels - especially if you equate things like optional side missions to volunteering for overtime and so on. Sure, you can 'grind' at a job for 10 years and still be laid off, to use the example given in the article, but you will still have been earning during those 10 years and will have probably put away some cash for stuff you wanted; cars, gadgets, a home, holidays, etc. Grinding in a game is no different, only the stuff that you are saving up for is more focused on the needs of the game world than real life; abilities, vehicles, weapons, etc., and just as in real life if you stop grinding for whatever reason then you are going to find it a little harder to acquire/retain those trinkets.
Actually, I think Terry Pratchett has first dibs on this one.
Doesn't sound likely to me. The most likely outcome of an appeals process with an obviously biased jury would be for the Court of Appeal to declare a mistrial and pass the case back down to District Court for a do-over. In otherwords you are right back to square one, only both sides have now shown their cards. Other than the lawyers getting paid for a lot more hours, I don't see much benefit for anyone in that circumstance. Well, unless Samsung thought there that was no way they could prevail and were just trying to drag things out as long as possible in order to get non-infringing products to market and render the eventual verdict moot.
Music system turned out to be a bobcat. Would not buy again.
On the otherhand, it is easier on the ears than most of the latest chart music...
With hindsight, perhaps, but Samsung's legal team had their chance to evict him from the jury back in July when the jury was selected, so either they missed the chance or decided that there was a greater risk of pro-Apple bias from another juror and evicted someone else instead. From what I recall of the process there were a lot of potential jurors with a potential bias towards Apple (knowing Apple employees, owning Apple hardware, etc.) and Samsung couldn't get rid of them all, just as Apple couldn't get rid of the jurors that has similar potential bias towards Android/Samsung. I think it more likely that Samsung's legal team thought that as an electrical engineer and patent holder he might have a better grasp of their case and gambled that he might tip the balance more in their favour than in Apples'. If so it was a bad call, that's all.
IANAL, etc., but while they might have assumed that there would be an appeal - it was pretty much a given, regardless of the result, really - but it's not supposed to matter. One of their obligations as jurors is to set their personal opinions aside and provide both sides with a fair trial. If they can be shown to have failed to do that, then the only fair and legal way forward is to throw the entire thing out and start over from scratch with a new jury.
There are generally two way of appealing a verdict; attacking the opposing legal team (e.g. withholding and/or misrepresenting evidence), and attacking the court (e.g. failure to follow procedure, clear bias). I'm guessing Samsung's legal team will go mostly for the latter. Not withstanding the rulings from Judge Koh are heavily in Apple's favour, particularly in the case of denying some of their evidence (potential bias), there is a growing sentiment in the press that the jury badly failed in their duties, with the clear failure to sanity check their rulings against their penalties as Exhibit A.
My prediction; successful appeal from Samsung on grounds of a mis-trial then back to District Court for a do-over and, no doubt, subsequent appeals and counter appeals... It's going to be a loooong time before we can stick a fork in this one.
... and there's a potential huge opportunity for Samsung's marketing department here. As seen here, a court has just effectively ruled that Samsung's products are equivalent to Apple's. So, other than the Apple logo and brand name, why would you want an iThing when you can have the Samsung equivalent for any from a few tens of bucks to several hundred bucks less? After all, according to a US District Court, they are now essentially the same thing!
The trick (of course) would be for Samsung to pull off the marketing campaign without being found in contempt of court or getting their products pulled from the shelves...
He's an electrical engineer. Here's his patent at the USPTO.
I don't doubt that this is going to go through the upper reaches of legal system sooner or later, but initially at least, I think the solution is probably more in your second sentence than the first; non-vaccinated kids are putting other kids at risk, so perhaps the schools and local authorities need to start thinking about this in terms of risk and liability. Say one of the non-vaccinated kids is shown to have introduced a serious illness into a class, which then rips through the non-vaccinated pupils in that class and probably also picks up a few of the vaccinated ones too since vaccination isn't always 100% effective. If fatalities and/or life-changing debilities result it's probably just a matter of time before someone decides to sue their school board for gross negligence in failing to adequately protect little Johnny from what ails/ailed him, regardless of whether little Johnny was vaccinated or not.
Not a lot a school is going to be able to prevent that from happening, particularly since some particularly nasty diseases are contageous before the symptoms become visible. Segregating the non-vaccinated kids individually clearly isn't going to be viable, so that really just leaves a choice between a school insisting on its pupils being vaccinated or them being unable to attend. Of course, neither of those options are likely to be palatable to the parents who strongly believe in the non-vaccination of their kids, even if the school provides them with some suitably frank educational material, so the courts are still going to get involved.
Because it's vitally important to load balance...
Well, OP didn't actually say which aspect ratio would be preferred, although I'd guess that more vertical real estate is extremely likely as I also find 16:9 to be somewhat awkward for working on. Despite widescreen monitors being commonplace, GUIs and applications still tend to be designed with a 4:3 ratio in mind, with menus and toolbars across the top, which on widescreen displays leaves a letterbox proportioned working area that just looks "wrong" to me. When word processing, even with two pages side by side, that means there's usually far too much space wasted horizontally, and if you prefer to have your documents one above the other then it's even worse. Full screen spreadsheets are more of a mixed bag depending on which direction the data primarily extends to; if you have a large vertically orientated spreadsheet the extra scrolling can soon add up. After that, it gets a little more application specific, depending on the layout of toolbars and so on, but generally I'd go with more vertical space than 16:9 for work every time.
Now for leisure apps, on the otherhand - viewing movies and playing first person perspective games - then the narrower aspect ratios make more sense to me as they provide a more cinematic experience and help cut down on distractions in your peripheral vision respectively. Since this standard is being driven by the cinema and broadcast industries, it's pretty obvious where their priorities are going to lie.
Based on the experiences of the DNS Changer Working Group trying to get ISPs to notify their infected users of the imminent demise of the substitute DNS Changer DNS servers, I'd say it is unlikely to work. The sad fact is that many ISPs (and there would be a *lot* of ISPs with hosts on a typical botnet) simply don't give a crap at the best of times, let alone when suggesting they take a course of action that would entail costs - postage of letters, support calls, setting up a sandbox for infected users, etc.
Well, duh! He's pro-life isn't he? Stands to reason that he'd be pro-campaign as well...
Now? Not so much. But since it's a fairly obvious method of making the Windows 8 UI more palatable, I'd expect to see them become much more common than they are now once Windows 8 is shipping and especially so on laptops where your fingertips are only a short distance from the screen anyway and you can't just keep the screen from your previous PC. I wouldn't expect a huge uptake but more than enough to ensure that touch is going to at least be an option, if not the default, on pretty much every new PC model offered by the time Windows 9 comes around.
This.
You think Microsoft gives a damn which version of their desktop OS corporates use? Get real! All they care about it that they do use a version of their OS, hopefully in order to run MS Office and other MS applications as well, and not someone else's OS. Since pretty much any corporate with an MS desktop deployment that matters is now on MS's Software Assurance scheme they essentially have the revenue guaranteed already, no matter what version of Windows they decide to deploy.
Factor in what happened with XP/Vista on the corporate desktop and there might even be a little bit of sense here. Forcing the new UI down home user's throats, whether they want it on the desktop or not, increases market penetration and user awareness, plus it helps drive sales of Windows 8 tablets and phones, although to what extent remains to be seen. By the time Windows 9 comes along, touch screens on the desktop should be fairly commonplace, users will be familiar with the new UI, and there will hopefully be plenty of business apps available to run on it. Anyone care to bet whether Windows 7 will get EOL'd not too long after Windows 9 SP1 ships?
But apart from the clean water, indoor plumbing, air conditioning, and the HDMI switchers... What have the Romans ever done for us?
Yeah, I'm skeptical too and find it somewhat hard to believe the story hasn't come out before now. Still, MIT was responsible for the trajectories, which was why I suggested it as a possibilty for there being some truth behind what is quite likely an urban myth. Basic orbital mechanics would dictate a lot of the flight path options, so unless there was something specific to do with the explosion and its aftermath, I can't see much room for MIT to actually do anything so significant in that area.
Tough break for the Iranian people, but like other countries with draconian Internet access policies I suspect that a way will be found. As Cuba's government found out; you should never underestimate the ability of large numbers of USB sticks gifted by benefactors to facilitate the free flow of restricted information; it just takes a little longer, that's all. For the rest of us though, this is excellent news. When the next cyber-weapon gets loose on the the Iranian "Halal-net", or whatever the regime is referring to it as this week, we can sleep easy knowing that our industrial control systems are already air-gapped from the Iranian ones. With that element of risk removed, I suspect the next attack on Iranian infrastructure probably isn't going to be quite so "restrained" as the last few have been.
That was my first thought too, but maybe there is something behind this. The slingshot might have been in the book, but that was before the oxygen tank blew and the possibility that the astronauts might suffocate on their own CO2 before they made it back to Earth became an issue. It's fairly well documented that there was a lot of debate and slide-ruling over whether to proceed with the slingshot or that an abort and a quick return might be the only way to get the astronauts back before they ran out of air. My guess is that the MIT student, if they existed at all, came up with some math that proved that the abort/return approach simply wasn't going to work for some reason (unable to achieve a viable angle for a sucessful reentry, perhaps) and that at least with the slingshot there was a chance.
I think the credibility of that security audit has just been seriously undermined given the recent revelations that Huawei's routers are riddled with security problems. GCHQ was supposed to be auditing these things to ensure that they were fit for use on the UK's national infrastructure; things like 3G/LTE networks, airports, highways, powerstations, railways, and so on. So, which is it? Either they failed to find the vulnerabilities, even with the advantage of access that Felix Lindner presumably didn't have when he found the vulnerabilities, and so the audit is worthless. Alternatively, GCHQ found them and decided it was better to risk any part of the UK's national infrastructure that used Huawei routers on the off chance that the UK government might be able to use the exploits against a foreign infrastructure in, say, Africa, China, or the Middle East where Huawei has a fair sized market presence.
Then again, they might have found the vulnerabilities, pretended they hadn't for the look of the thing, and any sensitive tender that might end up utilising Huawei equipment would get a discreet visit from someone senior at Cheltenham or Whitehall to advise them that, just maybe, one of the other tenderers might be a "better choice" for being the successful bidder...