That's interesting. For anyone who, like me, wasn't familiar with Quick Sync, it seems to be a dedicated video codec chip on the CPU. In testing, it was much faster than CPU or even GPU encoding, but at lower picture quality per megabyte.
You said Intel CPU. Did you mean Intel GPU? GPU encoding is about four times as fast as CPU. Of course that depends on which GPU is being compared to which CPU.
> There are many things a VM like Java can do that you can't do in C++
Quite the opposite. In fact, there nothing Java can do without it doing it in both C and C++. Java is itself DATA, instructions for a C++ program. It's the C++ that does everything. The Java jvm is itself a C++ program (Oracle's version) or a C program (most others).
I don't use Flashbuilder that much, as I prefer their other tool, but I've never had a problem with any version of Flashbuilder on my Mac. It might be worth a try if the Windows version isn't working for you.
What you've said is certainly true, that's clear. It should also be noted that many "national security types" take the Constitution very seriously. Some of them comment about that right here on Slashdot, where mentioning the Constitution in any thread not mentioning Snowden gets you ridiculed as a "tea bagger".
No, the ruling is about private citizens who are "not acting as an agent of the government", meaning not even at the BEHEST of government. Clearly the NSA is government, so that doesn't apply to them. As government agents, any evidence produced by the NSA is inadmissible IN A CRIMINAL CASE unless it was legally obtained.
> All this evidence, collected this way, is admissable because it could have been discovered
The ccops illegally tap your phone line and hear about a pot deal. What did not happen is that a a K9 officer COULD HAVE been taking the dog out for a walk when they just happened to walk by a car full of pot. That didn't happen, but it could have.
If I'm understanding you correctly, you are claiming that the cops can search the vehicle and it's not fruit of a poisonous tree because they could have stumbled upon it. They didn't, but they could have. Do you have a citation for that? In all of American jurisprudence has any appeals court held that it's okay to violate the Constitution because they could have not violated it? I know a certain "law professor" (who never taught law) who might believe that, but has the court ever ruled such?
The open source driver has been fine for me. I'm not a gamer, though. For games, I don't know. In any event, since Nvidia is now beginning to contribute rather than obstruct work on Nouveau, I don't see any reason that it shouldn't be similar to the proprietary driver very soon.
You've got it backwards. The oil companies didn't ask State for this study. They thought the other four studies were enough. Arguably, under law the it should have been approved after the first two.
After four impact studies found it would be neutral or a net positive, Obama had State do a study, hoping SOMEONE would say it was bad. Someone at state had enough integrity to tell the truth rather than give Obama what he asked them for.
The enviro scare mongers say some crazy shit. You're on the right side of the issue, but apparently haven't researched enough to know WHY the scare mongers are wrong. Saying stuff like that, without doing any research first, makes our side look bad. You're like Sara Palin - you may be on the right side of the issue, but you make your side look silly by talking without knowing what you're talking about.
A) yes. Pavarotti's voice is very pleasing. The richness of his voice, the multi-frequency sound, is much like he's singing harmony with himself. Reverb in the room makes it even more pleasing. All that extra sound makes it much harder to understand the words.
Think about this - which has a more pleasing sound, the Vienna Boys Choir or "you've got mail"? Which has a greater frequency range? Which is easier to understand? Counter-intuitively, the choir would be easier to understand if you REMOVED all voices except one. Extra timbre sounds pleasing, just as calligraphy looks pleasing. Removing all the extra swirls and stuff from calligraphy, leaving a simple typed font, makes it easier to read. Voices are the same way.
B) being in the same room with the speaker isn't an option, and that matters, but STILL yes. In a large room, with reverb, a speaker may be very hard to understand. Especially so if you're listening from 1/4 or 3/4 of the way toward the back of the room. A filtered recording can be much, much better, especially for certain room sizes. I'll show you why.
Gently blow a little air out of your mouth. You'll notice if makes a very faint sound. Then, imagine a flutist. The flutist is gently blowing out, which makes a sound. The flute is resonant at a certain frequency, so it amplifies that tone by 100X, making the sound loud rather than extremely faint. Rooms are resonant too. They greatly amplify sound at their resonant frequency and your brain filters that out. Specifically, larger rooms tend to resonate between 40-200Hz, which is deep bass. That resonantly amplified sound is "extra" sound that the speaker didn't intend to make, and it's often loud enough to make it hard to hear the words. The brain tries to filter it out, so you don't consciously notice it most of the time, but it's there, and it gets in the way. Electronically gating that sound below 500Hz allows you to hear the sounds the speaker intends you to hear.
Sinuses, the mouth, and the desk all resonate too. None of that is the frequency that the vocal cords are trying to make, so it's all "noise", which you can think of as "static", and it gets in the way.
Seriously, instead of arguing that your first thought must be right, look at any of the research. From at least the 1940s until the present day people have been researching to find the right balance between intelligibility (from narrow frequency range) vs the warm sound of a broader frequency range. From the early days of radio to today's voice codecs, specialists have been tuning for the best balance for a given use case. FM broadcast radio has different requirements than air traffic control radio, but anyone who has studied the subject for an hour knows that the basic trade-off is intelligibility / warmth / bandwidth. Warmer sound is harder to understand and takes more bandwidth.
That wasn't your first guess. That's cool. You're not stupid, though, so you're not going to refuse to learn anything, insisting that there isn't anything you didn't already know, are you?
In the actual cash for clunkers, they spent $100 million administrative costs to destroy $140 million worth of cars, for which they paid $2.8 billion.
The $2.8 billion can be seen as a transfer to the car manufactures and dealers. The $140 million of cars that were destroyed went to no-one - they were destroyed. They COULD have been given to the less fortunate, or perhaps assign them to the parole office where people working to get a fresh start could use them to get to a job. Lots of things COULD have been done with that value, 700,000 could have received cars, but instead they were destroyed.
Had those 700,000 cars went to under privileged college freshmen as a bonus to the scholarship program, the program would benefit someone. Noone benefits from the destruction of perfectly usable transportation.
Additionally, with the actual program, the way the actual government does things, to qualify you had to be a) driving and old, cheap car and b) buy a brand new car. Do you know what happens when people who can afford an old car sign a $15,000 loan for a new car, in the middle of a recession? Reposession, ruined credit, and no way to get to work. That's what happens. Take a guess what percentage of cash for clunkers cars got repoed. On top of the billions of wasted money reported as the direct cost of the program, it also saddled those who could least afford it with debt they'd been avoiding, costing the economy another billion dollars.
If you and I choose to make a trade, you give me $X and I give you Y item, we make that deal because it works for both of us. It's a win-win, unless one of us is being stupid. When the government mandates that they are going to take your money and use it to destroy things, that's not a win for anybody.
You may not "get it" is to why emphasizing the frequencies that contain the intelligibility helps, but that fact has been known since the 1940s or so. See any of the Navy Signal Corp or Bell Labs research. The deep harmonics of a male voice sound nice, and they make the speech harder to understand. Room reverberations sometimes make a BIG difference, because they effectively amplify one low frequency, the resonant frequency.
I have many hours of CDs from recording people making speeches. A notch filter always makes it easier to understand what they are saying. Sometimes. it makes a BIG difference.
True, the casinos want equal betting on both sides. Therefore, the casinos analyze the odds of who will win only when they open the betting. GP is correct that those predictions are often quite wrong. Additionally, Vegas is full of other professionals who do make predictions of who will win, and most importantly, by how much they'll win. People into sports betting read the expert predictions all the time. These professionals have a pretty poor track record.
All of which means YOU are the ignorant fuck and worse than being ignorant you're a total dickhead.
The disk? Did you really just say that? You just said the DISK in a phone draws so much power that the CPU doesn't really matter? Umm, phones don't have hard drives. They don't need powerful GPUs either, and the screen is off 96% of the time.
Intel x86 (actually AMD 64) sometimes makes sense in a desktop, where you do have a couple of hard drives, a powerful GPU, etc. A phone is not a desktop. A phone is a low power device. Finally Intel doesn't use a THOUSAND times as much power as ARM anymore, so it's now POSSIBLE for a masochist to use an Intel phone.
ARM was making milliwatt and nanowatt processors while Intel was still focused on their latest 85 watt powerhouse. Intel has finally seen the writing on the wall and their making great strides trying to catch up. They're still a few laps behind, though. That's perfectly reasonable and unexpected - until a couple years ago Intel did a great job staying ahead of their competition, AMD. Intel successfully beat AMD for raw performance per core ( though not performance per dollar). They achieved exactly what they set out to do. It's just that the market suddenly changed under them and now they customers want the opposite of what Intel does so well.
An analog line in the US currently has to supply 5 REN, which is about 300 milliamps. A typical Cisco phone uses 125 milliamps. So they are ALREADY providing enough power to run two VoIP phones. If you also want internet service from the phone company on the same line, you can plug your router into the other side of the Cisco. Offices are commonly wired that way. The phone plugs into the network and the PC ethernet plugs into the phone.
In other words, you don't have to power the customer's network, their network is DOWNstream of the phone. It can also be completely separate - you could have internet from a different company than the one who provides phone service.
Think of it this way. What if your phone had a modem chip in it and every time you made a call that modem chip digitized the audio on it's way to the phone line outside. How would that effect the operation of your phone? It wouldn't. They could already be doing that and you wouldn't even know.
A company that charges you $10 for a single call and you still haven't switched to Vonage at $25 / month, or Vitelity (cents per hour) or any of the other companies that treat you as a customer rather than a victim?!
My business has used Vonage for years and we're very happy with it. Only when we first got it we had it set to high bandwidth, which our modem wouldn't carry without stuttering. Since we set it to medium or low bandwidth ten years ago we've had no trouble. If you've used something like Magic Jack $10 / year?) and you thought that all VoIP was like that I can understand. It's not, though. If you're willing to pay a few dollars per month there are several very good VoIP providers who will provide you with good service.
All available evidence suggests that the vast majority originate in China. That makes sense - it would be silly to go through the great firewall, twice, and slow yourself down by going around the world and back, when you could just as easily use a US zombie.
If you set the VoIP to low bandwidth requirements (sometimes erroneously marked as low quality), it'll be almost exactly like a POTS line -low latency and low fidelity. If you use a high bandwidth setting, you'll get high fidelity, but more short drop outs and latency. Personally, I much prefer the low bandwidth setting.
Similarly you can choose different codecs. This is voice , not music, so you don't want hi-fi. A restricted frequency range actually makes voice much MORE intelligible because 95% of the intelligibility is in a narrow frequency range. The high and low frequencies are where the unwanted noise is.
Modems and fax work fine over VoIP if you set their speed (bandwidth) lower than the bandwidth setting of the voip. If you set the voip channel to 48Kbps and set the fax to 56Kps that doesn't work well - you're trying to 56K of data through a 48K channel.
Instead, set the VoIP to 64 and the fax to 34. 34K through a 64K channel works fine.
That's unrelated to analog vs digital or circuit vs packet. The phone company can put power on a digital line just as easily as they can put power on an analog line
Sometimes spending is just spending. Suppose the government spends a bunch of money crushing perfectly usable cars. $100 million worth of cars are turned into $1 million of scrap metal. To do so, they spend $1 million on diesel fuel for the equipment that crushes and transports the cars.
Show me where that $100 million ends up in someone's savings account.
You're assuming when the government spends $1 billion, it ALWAYS spends it on something that creates $1 billion in value. If $1 billion leaves the government, it has to go somewhere, right? Sometimes it goes down the toilet. In fact, not only does $1 billion in government spending not ALWAYS produce something worth $1 billion, it RARELY does so. So in ftfy would be changing "always" to "rarely" - net governtment spending is rarely net private saving.
The government's newest major computer system is healthcare.gov. What kind of weapon you need to take down major, modern government computer systems ? Apparently, Thursdays are you sufficient to take down healthcare.gov.
Super advanced cyber weapons simply aren't needed. How many programmers who ended up working government jobs even know what a "SQL injection" is, much less how to prevent it? One small sample suggests only 20% of government programmers know what it is, and 10% use parameterized queries, leaving most systems open to trivial attacks.
I'd guesstimate on average, we log about 50-100 attack attempts from Chinese IPs per server per day. Our sample size is only several thousand customer servers, but that's enough to get a rough idea of what's happening on the internet generally.
There IS cyber war going on, much like the Cold War. It's not on the news every day, but it's happening just as much as Reagan was trying to defeat the USSR. The weapons aren't that advanced most of the time simply because they don't need to be - the targets very cooperatively run PHP scripts written by kids with NO security training whatsoever. When your admin interface is open to brute force and SQL injection attacks, advanced weapons aren't needed. The secretary of state and chairman of the senate defense committee have the same unpatched Linksys router at home as any random person. How many high level bureaucrats have VoIP at home? VoIP "protected" by Netgear's firewall?
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That's interesting. For anyone who, like me, wasn't familiar with Quick Sync, it seems to be a dedicated video codec chip on the CPU. In testing, it was much faster than CPU or even GPU encoding, but at lower picture quality per megabyte.
You said Intel CPU. Did you mean Intel GPU?
GPU encoding is about four times as fast as CPU. Of course that depends on which GPU is being compared to which CPU.
> There are many things a VM like Java can do that you can't do in C++
Quite the opposite. In fact, there nothing Java can do without it doing it in both C and C++. Java is itself DATA, instructions for a C++ program. It's the C++ that does everything. The Java jvm is itself a C++ program (Oracle's version) or a C program (most others).
I don't use Flashbuilder that much, as I prefer their other tool, but I've never had a problem with any version of Flashbuilder on my Mac. It might be worth a try if the Windows version isn't working for you.
Flash Professional might be another option.
What you've said is certainly true, that's clear.
It should also be noted that many "national security types" take the Constitution very seriously. Some of them comment about that right here on Slashdot, where mentioning the Constitution in any thread not mentioning Snowden gets you ridiculed as a "tea bagger".
No, the ruling is about private citizens who are "not acting as an agent of the government", meaning not even at the BEHEST of government. Clearly the NSA is government, so that doesn't apply to them. As government agents, any evidence produced by the NSA is inadmissible IN A CRIMINAL CASE unless it was legally obtained.
> All this evidence, collected this way, is admissable because it could have been discovered
The ccops illegally tap your phone line and hear about a pot deal.
What did not happen is that a a K9 officer COULD HAVE been taking the dog out for a walk when they just happened to walk by a car full of pot. That didn't happen, but it could have.
If I'm understanding you correctly, you are claiming that the cops can search the vehicle and it's not fruit of a poisonous tree because they could have stumbled upon it. They didn't, but they could have. Do you have a citation for that? In all of American jurisprudence has any appeals court held that it's okay to violate the Constitution because they could have not violated it? I know a certain "law professor" (who never taught law) who might believe that, but has the court ever ruled such?
They are officers of the court, and not of the executive. This was made explicit by ex parte Garland shortly after the civil war.
The open source driver has been fine for me. I'm not a gamer, though. For games, I don't know. In any event, since Nvidia is now beginning to contribute rather than obstruct work on Nouveau, I don't see any reason that it shouldn't be similar to the proprietary driver very soon.
You've got it backwards. The oil companies didn't ask State for this study. They thought the other four studies were enough. Arguably, under law the it should have been approved after the first two.
After four impact studies found it would be neutral or a net positive, Obama had State do a study, hoping SOMEONE would say it was bad. Someone at state had enough integrity to tell the truth rather than give Obama what he asked them for.
The enviro scare mongers say some crazy shit. You're on the right side of the issue, but apparently haven't researched enough to know WHY the scare mongers are wrong. Saying stuff like that, without doing any research first, makes our side look bad. You're like Sara Palin - you may be on the right side of the issue, but you make your side look silly by talking without knowing what you're talking about.
A) yes. Pavarotti's voice is very pleasing. The richness of his voice, the multi-frequency sound, is much like he's singing harmony with himself. Reverb in the room makes it even more pleasing. All that extra sound makes it much harder to understand the words.
Think about this - which has a more pleasing sound, the Vienna Boys Choir or "you've got mail"? Which has a greater frequency range? Which is easier to understand? Counter-intuitively, the choir would be easier to understand if you REMOVED all voices except one. Extra timbre sounds pleasing, just as calligraphy looks pleasing. Removing all the extra swirls and stuff from calligraphy, leaving a simple typed font, makes it easier to read. Voices are the same way.
B) being in the same room with the speaker isn't an option, and that matters, but STILL yes. In a large room, with reverb, a speaker may be very hard to understand. Especially so if you're listening from 1/4 or 3/4 of the way toward the back of the room. A filtered recording can be much, much better, especially for certain room sizes. I'll show you why.
Gently blow a little air out of your mouth. You'll notice if makes a very faint sound. Then, imagine a flutist. The flutist is gently blowing out, which makes a sound. The flute is resonant at a certain frequency, so it amplifies that tone by 100X, making the sound loud rather than extremely faint. Rooms are resonant too. They greatly amplify sound at their resonant frequency and your brain filters that out. Specifically, larger rooms tend to resonate between 40-200Hz, which is deep bass. That resonantly amplified sound is "extra" sound that the speaker didn't intend to make, and it's often loud enough to make it hard to hear the words. The brain tries to filter it out, so you don't consciously notice it most of the time, but it's there, and it gets in the way. Electronically gating that sound below 500Hz allows you to hear the sounds the speaker intends you to hear.
Sinuses, the mouth, and the desk all resonate too. None of that is the frequency that the vocal cords are trying to make, so it's all "noise", which you can think of as "static", and it gets in the way.
Seriously, instead of arguing that your first thought must be right, look at any of the research. From at least the 1940s until the present day people have been researching to find the right balance between intelligibility (from narrow frequency range) vs the warm sound of a broader frequency range. From the early days of radio to today's voice codecs, specialists have been tuning for the best balance for a given use case. FM broadcast radio has different requirements than air traffic control radio, but anyone who has studied the subject for an hour knows that the basic trade-off is intelligibility / warmth / bandwidth. Warmer sound is harder to understand and takes more bandwidth.
That wasn't your first guess. That's cool. You're not stupid, though, so you're not going to refuse to learn anything, insisting that there isn't anything you didn't already know, are you?
In the actual cash for clunkers, they spent $100 million administrative costs to destroy $140 million worth of cars, for which they paid $2.8 billion.
The $2.8 billion can be seen as a transfer to the car manufactures and dealers. The $140 million of cars that were destroyed went to no-one - they were destroyed. They COULD have been given to the less fortunate, or perhaps assign them to the parole office where people working to get a fresh start could use them to get to a job. Lots of things COULD have been done with that value, 700,000 could have received cars, but instead they were destroyed.
Had those 700,000 cars went to under privileged college freshmen as a bonus to the scholarship program, the program would benefit someone. Noone benefits from the destruction of perfectly usable transportation.
Additionally, with the actual program, the way the actual government does things, to qualify you had to be a) driving and old, cheap car and b) buy a brand new car. Do you know what happens when people who can afford an old car sign a $15,000 loan for a new car, in the middle of a recession? Reposession, ruined credit, and no way to get to work. That's what happens. Take a guess what percentage of cash for clunkers cars got repoed. On top of the billions of wasted money reported as the direct cost of the program, it also saddled those who could least afford it with debt they'd been avoiding, costing the economy another billion dollars.
If you and I choose to make a trade, you give me $X and I give you Y item, we make that deal because it works for both of us. It's a win-win, unless one of us is being stupid. When the government mandates that they are going to take your money and use it to destroy things, that's not a win for anybody.
You may not "get it" is to why emphasizing the frequencies that contain the intelligibility helps, but that fact has been known since the 1940s or so. See any of the Navy Signal Corp or Bell Labs research. The deep harmonics of a male voice sound nice, and they make the speech harder to understand. Room reverberations sometimes make a BIG difference, because they effectively amplify one low frequency, the resonant frequency.
I have many hours of CDs from recording people making speeches. A notch filter always makes it easier to understand what they are saying. Sometimes. it makes a BIG difference.
True, the casinos want equal betting on both sides. Therefore, the casinos analyze the odds of who will win only when they open the betting. GP is correct that those predictions are often quite wrong. Additionally, Vegas is full of other professionals who do make predictions of who will win, and most importantly, by how much they'll win. People into sports betting read the expert predictions all the time. These professionals have a pretty poor track record.
All of which means YOU are the ignorant fuck and worse than being ignorant you're a total dickhead.
The disk? Did you really just say that? You just said the DISK in a phone draws so much power that the CPU doesn't really matter? Umm, phones don't have hard drives. They don't need powerful GPUs either, and the screen is off 96% of the time.
Intel x86 (actually AMD 64) sometimes makes sense in a desktop, where you do have a couple of hard drives, a powerful GPU, etc. A phone is not a desktop. A phone is a low power device. Finally Intel doesn't use a THOUSAND times as much power as ARM anymore, so it's now POSSIBLE for a masochist to use an Intel phone.
ARM was making milliwatt and nanowatt processors while Intel was still focused on their latest 85 watt powerhouse. Intel has finally seen the writing on the wall and their making great strides trying to catch up. They're still a few laps behind, though. That's perfectly reasonable and unexpected - until a couple years ago Intel did a great job staying ahead of their competition, AMD. Intel successfully beat AMD for raw performance per core ( though not performance per dollar). They achieved exactly what they set out to do. It's just that the market suddenly changed under them and now they customers want the opposite of what Intel does so well.
An analog line in the US currently has to supply 5 REN, which is about 300 milliamps. A typical Cisco phone uses 125 milliamps. So they are ALREADY providing enough power to run two VoIP phones. If you also want internet service from the phone company on the same line, you can plug your router into the other side of the Cisco. Offices are commonly wired that way. The phone plugs into the network and the PC ethernet plugs into the phone.
In other words, you don't have to power the customer's network, their network is DOWNstream of the phone. It can also be completely separate - you could have internet from a different company than the one who provides phone service.
Think of it this way. What if your phone had a modem chip in it and every time you made a call that modem chip digitized the audio on it's way to the phone line outside. How would that effect the operation of your phone? It wouldn't. They could already be doing that and you wouldn't even know.
A company that charges you $10 for a single call and you still haven't switched to Vonage at $25 / month, or Vitelity (cents per hour) or any of the other companies that treat you as a customer rather than a victim?!
My business has used Vonage for years and we're very happy with it. Only when we first got it we had it set to high bandwidth, which our modem wouldn't carry without stuttering. Since we set it to medium or low bandwidth ten years ago we've had no trouble. If you've used something like Magic Jack $10 / year?) and you thought that all VoIP was like that I can understand. It's not, though. If you're willing to pay a few dollars per month there are several very good VoIP providers who will provide you with good service.
All available evidence suggests that the vast majority originate in China. That makes sense - it would be silly to go through the great firewall, twice, and slow yourself down by going around the world and back, when you could just as easily use a US zombie.
If you set the VoIP to low bandwidth requirements (sometimes erroneously marked as low quality), it'll be almost exactly like a POTS line -low latency and low fidelity. If you use a high bandwidth setting, you'll get high fidelity, but more short drop outs and latency. Personally, I much prefer the low bandwidth setting.
Similarly you can choose different codecs. This is voice , not music, so you don't want hi-fi. A restricted frequency range actually makes voice much MORE intelligible because 95% of the intelligibility is in a narrow frequency range. The high and low frequencies are where the unwanted noise is.
Modems and fax work fine over VoIP if you set their speed (bandwidth) lower than the bandwidth setting of the voip. If you set the voip channel to 48Kbps and set the fax to 56Kps that doesn't work well - you're trying to 56K of data through a 48K channel.
Instead, set the VoIP to 64 and the fax to 34. 34K through a 64K channel works fine.
That's unrelated to analog vs digital or circuit vs packet. The phone company can put power on a digital line just as easily as they can put power on an analog line
Sometimes spending is just spending. Suppose the government spends a bunch of money crushing perfectly usable cars. $100 million worth of cars are turned into $1 million of scrap metal. To do so, they spend $1 million on diesel fuel for the equipment that crushes and transports the cars.
Show me where that $100 million ends up in someone's savings account.
You're assuming when the government spends $1 billion, it ALWAYS spends it on something that creates $1 billion in value. If $1 billion leaves the government, it has to go somewhere, right? Sometimes it goes down the toilet. In fact, not only does $1 billion in government spending not ALWAYS produce something worth $1 billion, it RARELY does so. So in ftfy would be changing "always" to "rarely" - net governtment spending is rarely net private saving.
The government's newest major computer system is healthcare.gov. What kind of weapon you need to take down major, modern government computer systems ? Apparently, Thursdays are you sufficient to take down healthcare.gov.
Super advanced cyber weapons simply aren't needed. How many programmers who ended up working government jobs even know what a "SQL injection" is, much less how to prevent it? One small sample suggests only 20% of government programmers know what it is, and 10% use parameterized queries, leaving most systems open to trivial attacks.
I'd guesstimate on average, we log about 50-100 attack attempts from Chinese IPs per server per day. Our sample size is only several thousand customer servers, but that's enough to get a rough idea of what's happening on the internet generally.
There IS cyber war going on, much like the Cold War. It's not on the news every day, but it's happening just as much as Reagan was trying to defeat the USSR. The weapons aren't that advanced most of the time simply because they don't need to be - the targets very cooperatively run PHP scripts written by kids with NO security training whatsoever. When your admin interface is open to brute force and SQL injection attacks, advanced weapons aren't needed. The secretary of state and chairman of the senate defense committee have the same unpatched Linksys router at home as any random person. How many high level bureaucrats have VoIP at home? VoIP "protected" by Netgear's firewall?