Yeah, there's always two ways to title a tech story, the utopian and the dystopian implications of a coming-of-age sci-fi technology. I'm beginning to think maybe only a form of democratic communism will save us from the techno barons of the future. That or the spread of molecular manufacturing, where the only resource you need is the dirt in your backyard, unless the hoi polloi have all been by the time packed into mega-prison-like kilometer-high apartment complexes.
Rather pointles calling an inorganic object germ-proof, unless we're talking about some genetically engineered supergerm that eats plastic for breakfast.Hell, I can guarantee that my cheap China-branded keyboard is also Ebola-proof. Just don't mail it back to me. Incidentally the fine article makes no mention of Ebola-proof, simply that the tablet is resistant to the common chemicals used to disinfect objects suspected of being contaminated with Ebola. So strictly speaking the tablet is disinfectant/antiseptic proof.
Just curious, what made the researchers think the creature was in fact bipedal. The fact the forelegs are shorter thant the hind legs? There's nothing in the article that tries to justify the assertion except the CG image. The creature could be no more bipedal than a bear or a gorilla that occasionally walks on two legs.
Not a genuine advantage with 99% of users (pirates included) outside the US (figure pulled off my behind). When was the last time you called tech support for support and not visit some online forum or your local tech guru.
The real issue: will the software police break down your door if you get reported using a legally upgraded "pirate" version? Can you just say, but the kind folks at Redmond say I get a pass, my sins have been forgiven?
I hope they're not as expert as the guys who do the pat-downs at transport terminals.Or what you know, they'll arm a monkey with some cool-looking tool that'll go beep and ask it to click if it sees a banana or something else.
Posting this after the story update that says the Microsoft offer is WORLDWIDE and not just made for China:
The question I find interesting is whether MS will allow modded copies to circulate, similar to the way say Google allows Cyanogenmod to come out with their own Android distro. I can't see how MS can prevent modded copies. Maybe MS will build a "time-bomb" into Win 10 that forces you to upgrade to a paying version of Win 10+. But I'm sure since it's a consumer oriented OS there are enough holes in it that would allow the OS to run virtually forever or until the last Intel-based machine comes out of the factory floor.
The way I see it, this "offer" is going to be permanent. There's no turning or shall we say cutting back on the free beer. Whether this is a good thing or not is another story altogether. Go ahead, enjoy your freeware (spyware?).
Does anybody know if the online document is the definitive copy of Stallman's published letter to the editor? I'm also curious about the other GNU docs, not that I think they were "retconned" to fit current realities in the software world today. But mainly because I think these documents should be preserved for their historical worth, warts, typos and all. It would interesting to study the progression of Stallman's thought from a focus purely on getting that proprietary printer in the corner to work to a more embracing political philosopy of information freedom.
"Once China/Taiwan/Malaysia finish their transition, it's game over for supply/demand until someone can stabilize Africa to the point of industrializing it and exploiting it for cheap labor."
I agree with you except for your selection of countries. Why group China Taiwan and Malaysia? Unless you're thinking of China annexing Taiwan (a real possibilty). As for Malaysia, it's too insignificant a country to matter in the global economic system, even if sometimes their leaders gets too loud-mouthed for their own good. Among Southeast Asian countries, Indonesia would carry more weight. Also you failed to mention that other people billionaire, India. So your projection would only come true after India fully industrializes.
None of the example pictures in the article and the paper @Arxiv show target/source person flashing a toothpaste smile. Does this mean their algorithm's only good for Mona Lisa? Maybe that's their secret (limitation)?
So Thunderbolt is turing out to be the Firewire of the new millenium. The first iterations of Firewire were at least a generation or two ahead of USB. Now almost everybody who wants fast plug-and-play data transfer uses USB 3. If nobody uses your advance tech, it soon becomes obsolete since no users means nobody is going to fund its future development.
" The OS also happens to be called Chrome but it is just a variant of Linux."
WTF is this modded insightful. Linux is just the kernel, maybe the heart of the operating system, but not the OS itself. The OS is the kernel and the whole bunch of other stuff that allows you to run the program you click, type or tap at. See: Ubuntu can be called an OS, a variant of what some free software advocates call GNU/Linux (but actually a little bit more). Android is an OS, mostly without GNU components, also based on the Linux kernel. OpenWRT is an embedded Linux-based OS for routers and other network devices. Chrome OS is another OS that runs on top of the Linux kernel.
Everything becomes a commodity when too much of it is produced. This goes for gadgets, fastfood, pulp fiction, and yes even American Idols and pornography.
But that goes without saying! Who would be fool enough to opt for a transplant if the part that's going to be swapped out is perfectly healthy. I mean heart transplants are for people with unhealthy hearts. Ditto for kidneys, livers, etc. So a potential body transplant would be for people with unhealthy bodies. Note that I used the word body tranplant, since our heads or at least the gray matter inside it, is what defines us as a person.
I think by the time they figure out how to successfully transplant whole bodies, they'd have figured out either: (1) how to regrow the damaged parts of the spinal cord and nervous system, (2) manufacture the parts needed for a cyborg (ala $6M Dollar Man or Ghost in the Shell.).
I think you're confusing two things. While in PC-land the GPU may (or may not) be involved in video decoding (stuff like Intel's VAAPI or nVidia's VDPAU), in ARM SoC-land, the GPU is quite often another beast from the part of the chip that decodes the video. The GPU, of course, is involved in rendering all those 3D Android games you play. But for showing stuff like so-called H265 video, an Android settop box would rely on a custom hardware video decoder separate from the GPU. This is quite similar to the way some PC chips have built in AES support.
This makes sense even if I'm to lazy to include links to back up my post. Everybody knows how GPU's are used for 3D games and those horrid wobbly desktop effects, while videos, whether they're plain MPEG or H26x, are strictly 2D. Intel's power-hungry CPUs can effectively brute-force the higher end video codecs like H265, while the lower-power Android SoCs require a hardware-based solution.
In which case, the better biopic would be Theory of Everything about Stephen Hawking, who arguably suffered much more than Turing. There's simply no contest between psychological torture and the sheer physical torture of being paralysed from the nose down. And Hawking was "helped" by lots of people besides his wife and the few physicists who shared his passion for seeking to understand the universe as it is. If Turing made the conscious decision to end his life, Hawking made the equally strong decision to survive despite the two years lease of life that doctors had given me.
Well at least the "incident" has a better context unless you're the sort to do a pure image search? Now the internet knows she's just another plain jane who did something stupid.
I see where you're coming from. However, doctors' jobs are probably more secure than your typical coder (someone less great than say Linus Torvalds or even that guy that wrote up systemd). Why? Because (witch-)doctoring, with the possible exception of the top-tier surgeons (analogies to the top tier of computing), is only partly about curing people. The typical doctor is more of human relations shaman, assuring that hypertensive old man or that overstressed young urban professional, don't worry, there's a pill to fix your problem, hallelujah. Doctors provide the human touch. So unless they're rockstar programmers, coders provide no value added service above and beyond the code the write.
"That's why there aren't any really old civilizations"
The GRBs don''t really explain anything. Because it leads to the question why any civilization would need 1 BILLION years to develop the technology ot withstand a GRB. Maybe it would explain why life hasn't evolved beyond the microbial level. But once a civilization has achieved the Iron Age of technology, such a civilization is likely to achieve space faring status within a thousand years, unless of course they wipe themselves out or get struck by a far more common local extinction level event.
I say an asteroid impact wiping out a nascent civilization is far more likely than a GRB wiping out a civilization just a few hundre years more advanced than ours.
One thing NZ has going for it is a low populatin density in a fairly isolated location (the US also has a low population density but is easily reachable by rampaging zombie looters). If things go hungry, you can always butcher, I mean cull the sheep, which outnumber people 10 to one. Better than NZ but more practicable than Elysium? Antarctica.
"Well, the way I see it, I'll trust a random XDA developer pushing closed-source hacks way more than I trust my carrier and/or handset manufacturer."
That's just plain silly.
Unless your random XDA developer also manufactured the phone and supplied the stock firmware, then you need to trust two parties: that random XDA developer AND your carrier. Remember just because the phone is rooted doesn't mean it also isn't running the manufacturer's (if any) malware.
So a phone which can be unlocked using a manufactured supplied tool is still safer than a phone that needs to be rooted. Safest of course is the phone you assembled yourself, right down to the circuit board level.
"By then English shall have fragmented into a bunch of different dialects, quite distinguishable from each other. Even today, try getting a Brit and a Texan into the same room and see if they can communicate. English will just become the root for a bunch of new languages, like Latin was the basis for the Romance languages."
In the past that would have been norm. But unless we descend into a Mad Max dystopia where technology retreats into a permanent dark age, the differences between cultures are more likely going to be sandpapered over until only the most significant ones remain. Why? Blame it on the Internet, what with people all over the world consuming more and more the same bland YouTube, Twitter and Facebook culture. Chinese is likely to remain Chinese (hell, they even have their own versions of YouTube and Twitter), but we'll gradually see the evaporation of the distinctions between British and American English.
I wouldn't go so far as to tar Microsoft as being a company that invented nothing of value. However, I don't think Bill Gates himself would qualify as an inventor of note. I mean, we generally don't say the microchip was invented by the stockholders of Texas Instruments?
Who says that money will still be THE most important thing. Money, for what it's worth is simply a symbolic representation of wealth. And what is wealth but goods or natural resources that are in the disposal or control of certain individuals. You don't normally call air wealth because nobody controls the air we breathe (maybe in a highly polluted dystopian future it could become wealth). So the problem isn't in the concentration of wealth but the concentration of power. The danger is the only a few individual will control those army of robots and automatons that would be used in the production of wealth.
I'm more of a Trekkie than a Jedi master, so just wondering if you'd enlighten me about the title. The Force Awakens? Doesn't that make this a prequel? Now if knowledge of the Force was lost after Return of the Jedi (along with the smarts on howto build a proper light saber), then we're talking about a RE-awakening of the Force. Of course The Force Reawakens sounds quite awful, but hey the Wachowskis did come up with a rather clever title for their Matrix sequel, even if the actual move left much to be desired.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, there's always two ways to title a tech story, the utopian and the dystopian implications of a coming-of-age sci-fi technology. I'm beginning to think maybe only a form of democratic communism will save us from the techno barons of the future. That or the spread of molecular manufacturing, where the only resource you need is the dirt in your backyard, unless the hoi polloi have all been by the time packed into mega-prison-like kilometer-high apartment complexes.
Rather pointles calling an inorganic object germ-proof, unless we're talking about some genetically engineered supergerm that eats plastic for breakfast.Hell, I can guarantee that my cheap China-branded keyboard is also Ebola-proof. Just don't mail it back to me. Incidentally the fine article makes no mention of Ebola-proof, simply that the tablet is resistant to the common chemicals used to disinfect objects suspected of being contaminated with Ebola. So strictly speaking the tablet is disinfectant/antiseptic proof.
Just curious, what made the researchers think the creature was in fact bipedal. The fact the forelegs are shorter thant the hind legs? There's nothing in the article that tries to justify the assertion except the CG image. The creature could be no more bipedal than a bear or a gorilla that occasionally walks on two legs.
"the agent won't help them without a valid key"
Not a genuine advantage with 99% of users (pirates included) outside the US (figure pulled off my behind). When was the last time you called tech support for support and not visit some online forum or your local tech guru.
The real issue: will the software police break down your door if you get reported using a legally upgraded "pirate" version? Can you just say, but the kind folks at Redmond say I get a pass, my sins have been forgiven?
I hope they're not as expert as the guys who do the pat-downs at transport terminals.Or what you know, they'll arm a monkey with some cool-looking tool that'll go beep and ask it to click if it sees a banana or something else.
Posting this after the story update that says the Microsoft offer is WORLDWIDE and not just made for China:
The question I find interesting is whether MS will allow modded copies to circulate, similar to the way say Google allows Cyanogenmod to come out with their own Android distro. I can't see how MS can prevent modded copies. Maybe MS will build a "time-bomb" into Win 10 that forces you to upgrade to a paying version of Win 10+. But I'm sure since it's a consumer oriented OS there are enough holes in it that would allow the OS to run virtually forever or until the last Intel-based machine comes out of the factory floor.
The way I see it, this "offer" is going to be permanent. There's no turning or shall we say cutting back on the free beer. Whether this is a good thing or not is another story altogether. Go ahead, enjoy your freeware (spyware?).
Does anybody know if the online document is the definitive copy of Stallman's published letter to the editor? I'm also curious about the other GNU docs, not that I think they were "retconned" to fit current realities in the software world today. But mainly because I think these documents should be preserved for their historical worth, warts, typos and all. It would interesting to study the progression of Stallman's thought from a focus purely on getting that proprietary printer in the corner to work to a more embracing political philosopy of information freedom.
"Once China/Taiwan/Malaysia finish their transition, it's game over for supply/demand until someone can stabilize Africa to the point of industrializing it and exploiting it for cheap labor."
I agree with you except for your selection of countries. Why group China Taiwan and Malaysia? Unless you're thinking of China annexing Taiwan (a real possibilty). As for Malaysia, it's too insignificant a country to matter in the global economic system, even if sometimes their leaders gets too loud-mouthed for their own good. Among Southeast Asian countries, Indonesia would carry more weight. Also you failed to mention that other people billionaire, India. So your projection would only come true after India fully industrializes.
None of the example pictures in the article and the paper @Arxiv show target/source person flashing a toothpaste smile. Does this mean their algorithm's only good for Mona Lisa? Maybe that's their secret (limitation)?
So Thunderbolt is turing out to be the Firewire of the new millenium. The first iterations of Firewire were at least a generation or two ahead of USB. Now almost everybody who wants fast plug-and-play data transfer uses USB 3. If nobody uses your advance tech, it soon becomes obsolete since no users means nobody is going to fund its future development.
" The OS also happens to be called Chrome but it is just a variant of Linux."
WTF is this modded insightful. Linux is just the kernel, maybe the heart of the operating system, but not the OS itself. The OS is the kernel and the whole bunch of other stuff that allows you to run the program you click, type or tap at. See: Ubuntu can be called an OS, a variant of what some free software advocates call GNU/Linux (but actually a little bit more). Android is an OS, mostly without GNU components, also based on the Linux kernel. OpenWRT is an embedded Linux-based OS for routers and other network devices. Chrome OS is another OS that runs on top of the Linux kernel.
And here I thought that static electricity was the friend of sensitive electronics.
Everything becomes a commodity when too much of it is produced. This goes for gadgets, fastfood, pulp fiction, and yes even American Idols and pornography.
But that goes without saying! Who would be fool enough to opt for a transplant if the part that's going to be swapped out is perfectly healthy. I mean heart transplants are for people with unhealthy hearts. Ditto for kidneys, livers, etc. So a potential body transplant would be for people with unhealthy bodies. Note that I used the word body tranplant, since our heads or at least the gray matter inside it, is what defines us as a person.
I think by the time they figure out how to successfully transplant whole bodies, they'd have figured out either: (1) how to regrow the damaged parts of the spinal cord and nervous system, (2) manufacture the parts needed for a cyborg (ala $6M Dollar Man or Ghost in the Shell.).
I think you're confusing two things. While in PC-land the GPU may (or may not) be involved in video decoding (stuff like Intel's VAAPI or nVidia's VDPAU), in ARM SoC-land, the GPU is quite often another beast from the part of the chip that decodes the video. The GPU, of course, is involved in rendering all those 3D Android games you play. But for showing stuff like so-called H265 video, an Android settop box would rely on a custom hardware video decoder separate from the GPU. This is quite similar to the way some PC chips have built in AES support.
This makes sense even if I'm to lazy to include links to back up my post. Everybody knows how GPU's are used for 3D games and those horrid wobbly desktop effects, while videos, whether they're plain MPEG or H26x, are strictly 2D. Intel's power-hungry CPUs can effectively brute-force the higher end video codecs like H265, while the lower-power Android SoCs require a hardware-based solution.
In which case, the better biopic would be Theory of Everything about Stephen Hawking, who arguably suffered much more than Turing. There's simply no contest between psychological torture and the sheer physical torture of being paralysed from the nose down. And Hawking was "helped" by lots of people besides his wife and the few physicists who shared his passion for seeking to understand the universe as it is. If Turing made the conscious decision to end his life, Hawking made the equally strong decision to survive despite the two years lease of life that doctors had given me.
Well at least the "incident" has a better context unless you're the sort to do a pure image search? Now the internet knows she's just another plain jane who did something stupid.
I see where you're coming from. However, doctors' jobs are probably more secure than your typical coder (someone less great than say Linus Torvalds or even that guy that wrote up systemd). Why? Because (witch-)doctoring, with the possible exception of the top-tier surgeons (analogies to the top tier of computing), is only partly about curing people. The typical doctor is more of human relations shaman, assuring that hypertensive old man or that overstressed young urban professional, don't worry, there's a pill to fix your problem, hallelujah. Doctors provide the human touch. So unless they're rockstar programmers, coders provide no value added service above and beyond the code the write.
"That's why there aren't any really old civilizations"
The GRBs don''t really explain anything. Because it leads to the question why any civilization would need 1 BILLION years to develop the technology ot withstand a GRB. Maybe it would explain why life hasn't evolved beyond the microbial level. But once a civilization has achieved the Iron Age of technology, such a civilization is likely to achieve space faring status within a thousand years, unless of course they wipe themselves out or get struck by a far more common local extinction level event.
I say an asteroid impact wiping out a nascent civilization is far more likely than a GRB wiping out a civilization just a few hundre years more advanced than ours.
One thing NZ has going for it is a low populatin density in a fairly isolated location (the US also has a low population density but is easily reachable by rampaging zombie looters). If things go hungry, you can always butcher, I mean cull the sheep, which outnumber people 10 to one. Better than NZ but more practicable than Elysium? Antarctica.
"Well, the way I see it, I'll trust a random XDA developer pushing closed-source hacks way more than I trust my carrier and/or handset manufacturer."
That's just plain silly.
Unless your random XDA developer also manufactured the phone and supplied the stock firmware, then you need to trust two parties: that random XDA developer AND your carrier. Remember just because the phone is rooted doesn't mean it also isn't running the manufacturer's (if any) malware.
So a phone which can be unlocked using a manufactured supplied tool is still safer than a phone that needs to be rooted. Safest of course is the phone you assembled yourself, right down to the circuit board level.
"By then English shall have fragmented into a bunch of different dialects, quite distinguishable from each other. Even today, try getting a Brit and a Texan into the same room and see if they can communicate. English will just become the root for a bunch of new languages, like Latin was the basis for the Romance languages."
In the past that would have been norm. But unless we descend into a Mad Max dystopia where technology retreats into a permanent dark age, the differences between cultures are more likely going to be sandpapered over until only the most significant ones remain. Why? Blame it on the Internet, what with people all over the world consuming more and more the same bland YouTube, Twitter and Facebook culture. Chinese is likely to remain Chinese (hell, they even have their own versions of YouTube and Twitter), but we'll gradually see the evaporation of the distinctions between British and American English.
I wouldn't go so far as to tar Microsoft as being a company that invented nothing of value. However, I don't think Bill Gates himself would qualify as an inventor of note. I mean, we generally don't say the microchip was invented by the stockholders of Texas Instruments?
Who says that money will still be THE most important thing. Money, for what it's worth is simply a symbolic representation of wealth. And what is wealth but goods or natural resources that are in the disposal or control of certain individuals. You don't normally call air wealth because nobody controls the air we breathe (maybe in a highly polluted dystopian future it could become wealth). So the problem isn't in the concentration of wealth but the concentration of power. The danger is the only a few individual will control those army of robots and automatons that would be used in the production of wealth.
I'm more of a Trekkie than a Jedi master, so just wondering if you'd enlighten me about the title. The Force Awakens? Doesn't that make this a prequel? Now if knowledge of the Force was lost after Return of the Jedi (along with the smarts on howto build a proper light saber), then we're talking about a RE-awakening of the Force. Of course The Force Reawakens sounds quite awful, but hey the Wachowskis did come up with a rather clever title for their Matrix sequel, even if the actual move left much to be desired.