I would guess that they were NSL'd for their signing keys; that would make it less secure in the future so the correct option is to burn the brand now. Reports said that both signing keys signed the new (crippled/canaried) executable, and that the keys had been re-uploaded with the same content on sourceforge. Their legit URL points to their sourceforge site. Instances of "U.S." in their source code were replaced with "United States".
It looks to me like they went through a lot of trouble to burn the brand down before any damage could be done with the NSA's new-found signing keys. It's a very, very bad sign that this happened to TrueCrypt. Good on them for being brave enough to inform us, despite the real risks they faced in doing so. If this project is forked, we can only hope the new maintainers are brave enough to do the same when the NSA goes after them. It also raises the question: how much other infrastructure has been compromised while the maintainers have stood silently by?
The problem is, corrupted binaries would be found out really easily.
First of all, we know you can produce the exact same binaries of TrueCrypt from the source code. The audit proved that.
With that, if you have a set of binaries, signed or not, you should be able to reproduce that binary with the source code. If you can't, it means the binary you have was not built from the source code you have
I.e., that binary is not trustworthy - do not use it.
But if you can repro the binary from source, it means the source and binary match, which means if there is something inside the binary, it would be in the source. Which means all you need to do is diff the source code from the previous version.
Thus making the whole signing key thing completely pointless and a red herring as you can bet TrueCrypt binaries and source will be cross verified by many people to begin with.
The only way to get around this is if the compilers are compromised in the classic attack.
Binaries reproducible via source code is important, it's why the TrueCrypt audit did it as the first thing. Once you have that, it can be re-verified easily and continually, proving the binaries and source correlate. From there, you can diff the sources to verify backdoors.
And all a user has to do is wait a few days after release when all the people much smarter do their analysis.
If ur SO can't operate your complicated setup then ur shits too complicated. One TV, one remote is all anyone needs. Presumably you have one of those nightmare Logitech do everything remotes that makes things "simple".
Yes, because it does simplify stuff.
The minimum remotes is 2 - cable box and TV. But then there's all the other stuff - you have game consoles (PS3, Xbox360, PS4, Xbone), Blu-Ray players, Rokus, etc.
In fact, what simplifies it down is that they ALL connect to the A/V receiver, so the only TV control needed is on/off.
But now you have to deal with remote controls for the Blu-Ray player, Roku (which is incompatible with consumer IR), and A/V receiver. PS3 remote was thankfully eliminated with the Blu-Ray player.
The hard part isn't operating the system - turn on the TV, turn on the A/V receiver, and press the appropriate input. Say "TV" for cable box, or "Blu-Ray" for the Blu-Ray.
The hard part is managing the number of remotes. Why should I have to remember that I'm watching a Blu-Ray and have to hit the pause button on it? The logitechs (which just require a bit of time to set up) mean I hit pause, the video stops. Doesn't matter if it's the cable box, or Blu-ray player, or whatever.
A VAT would be useful, because you can't hide a Maybach like you can some bonds in an offshore account. However, sales taxes are regressive in general, and again, the burden of it would be on the shoulders of people buying basic stuff to survive.
Generally speaking, basics are tax-exempt. At least the base foods - prepared and processed foods are generally taxed.
And sales taxes are among the most efficient of all taxes - for every dollar in sales tax collected, the impact to the economy is around $0.05 or so (i.e., the economy would be bigger by 5 cents had that dollar not been taken).
Income taxes though are the most disruptive - for every dollar collected, it costs the economy $1.05 or more (i.e., the economy loses $1.05 for every dollar collected).
It's unfortunate, but hit-and-running makes a lot more sense on public trackers: not only do you have no positive incentive for seeding, because nothing is tracking your ratio, but you also have a stronger *negative* incentive to seed, in that you're more likely to get caught the more you seed something.
So yeah. Private trackers are all kinds of better.
Only if you can afford a seedbox, because seeding a private tracker can mean to even get a 1:1 ratio requires seeding for years. Yes, years because all the seeders are using seedboxes on GigE links and thus get big-ass ratios while you struggle to just get 1:1.
Perhaps what private trackers need is to stop counting uploads beyond say, 4:1 or so to give everyone else a chance to get some upload going. Or to give the excess to other participants in the swarm
I quit participating in a lot of private trackers that were like this - the only way people could actually get ratio was during periods of "upload only" events or free 5 GB deals.
Even the summary already explains that. They expected the Device to sell well in the US, so it made sense to have a factory there. Only it doesn't sell well, but it does sell well in Asia, so they can as well just manufacture it there.
No, they expected the "MADE IN THE USA!" and "USA! USA! USA!" labels to sell it. It was also more a political move than a manufacturing one - namely Google wanted to prove their superiority to a certain fruity competitor that "you can manufacture in the US with not problems! See!"
Except well, it didn't turn out that way.
And in fact, Google is pretty piss-poor at manufacturing - did you SEE the factory? Rows and rows of workers (most likely illegal immigrants) manually hand-assembling everything, like they took a factory in China and moved it in the US. You can't do that in the US for a mass-manufactured item. You must automate, automate, automate. (And a factory job like this is the dullest thing in the world - you won't find many Americans clamoring to put tab A in slot B 8 hours a day for minimum wage).
After you automate, the costs go down significantly, and you can find people who actually want to do the job because maintaining automation is a skilled job that pays well.
I think we saw this with the Nexus Q, too.
And the reason for devices not selling well in the US is the bundling scam that the telecom operators runs. The telecom operators picks which models you can buy and which services that can be offered with it. So it may not be a fault with the device but with the business model.
Except it was available to be sold direct to consumers.
And Google is a big enough to company that they don't have to be beholden to carriers - they can do what Apple did and offer to sell it direct, unlocked. Especially since Google has a perfect sales venue for it - the Google Play store.
Of course, the big problem is Google can't sling atoms around like they can electrons - shopping for stuff at Google Play is an exercise in frustration at times and feels like an amateurish exercise compared to even the app store side.
That, and Google really needs to open retail stores. That sell stuff directly to walk-in customers. So like the Apple Store where everything on display can be bought then and there. And not like the Samsung or Microsoft stores that barely have anything and what they do sell can be random, and they'd much rather chase you to a store to sell you a phone than sell you an unlocked one right there.
We do not need concrete information. When a major encryption project like this closes shop, without any explanation, duress should be assumed. The current climate requires it.
The problem is, it doesn't make sense.
First of all, Lavabit is a bad example because they used one encryption key for everything - hence the FBI's request for all user's email because it's impossible to isolate just one mailbox. That was a Lavabit fault (one would reasonably assumed there was no master key involved).
TrueCrypt though doesn't have a "master key" - there is no one key that when disclosed will unlock every TrueCrypt volume out there. (At least, that's what the preliminary audit reports say).
And given the nature of TrueCrypt, it would be a challenge to implement such a backdoor - the audit verified that it's possible to recreate the binaries from the source.
And there's no real update in over 2 years. A NSL that forces them to implement something that sends the master key to the NSA would be known - it's not like people won't diff the source code or build and compare to see if there were holes.
And the audit itself didn't reveal anything big or major.
A more likely reason cropped up when someone claiming to be a TrueCrypt developer stepped up and claimed boredom as the reason. Basically the developers were burned out and didn't want to do it anymore. Perhaps some of the minor flaws in the audit would be too boring to fix, for example.
So why the announcement? Because unsupported it IS less secure - eventually more holes and vulnerabilities will turn up and it might be fatal. Better to get everyone off it rather than believing their data is secure against unknown future attacks.
And other people are trying to resurrect/fork it, trying to get all the legal ducks in a row to meet the requirements of the license.
Speaking of controllers, appletv is crying out for a fucking modern remote control like every other internet box has. Bluetooth connected (or whatever protocol, just not IR). My ps4 has a headphone jack on the controller itself, and it's fucking awesome. The appletv controller is always getting lost because it's the width of a credit card and slips beneath the couch cushions or wherever. I have better luck getting a woman than i have finding that thing. I like the roku controller a lot. Maybe I'll just map the Apple TV buttons to it?
Because bluetooth is f'in annoying.
The PS3 demonstrated that because it used a remote completely incompatible with home systems. Everything uses consumer IR to control them. So there's a huge industry around consumer IR.
Bluetooth remotes screw that up - sure you could buy $100 converters (well, $60 thanks to Logitech obsoleting every other device out there), but those are annoying.
So now, I have a nice remote that controls my TV, my AV receiver, my cable box, my TiVo, my Xbox, my Blu-Ray player. But now to watch f'in Netflix on my Roku, I have to pick up a second remote just to control it. Just so I can use it with headphones. But now I need two remotes.
If I cared to have two remotes, I might as well just have separate remotes for everything - two remotes, five remotes, what's the difference? Significant other will still call you saying things don't work because they picked up the wrong remote.
Seems Amazon and Google see the writing on the 'internet wall'.
Their core products/services are not going to bring them anymore revenue than what they get now, and can shrink further when nimble competitors or new ideas happen. So the only way is to branch out.
Google thinks it will be driver-less cars, automation, internet balloons, thermostat etc., while Amazon thinks it will be AWS, cloud and so on.
Surprisingly both these behemoths are not branching into life sciences. May be no has made good impressive power points yet.
The one company terribly lost is Apple. They are buying into an arthritic rapper!!!
What makes you think Google is seeing the writing on the wall? As far as anyone's concerned, Google's investment in home automation and such are to plaster more ads in non-traditional places.
Think about it - driverless cars means you can plaster the inside and outside with ads, AND get location information of those vehicles and their users. Internet balloons - there's nothing wrong with giving more internet to more people, especially if it means more eyeballs to see ads. Home automation/thermostats - well, now there's a treasure trove of information there - and eyeball space. Knowing the house habits of people inside, being able to show ads on the thermostat, etc.
Amazon's just expanding its reach. I mean, once they get people hooked on AWS and everything, they can start to leverage them to "get a better deal" (see Hachette).
I mean, once they've got your data, you're their bitch.
Apple? They rely neither on ads nor services for revenue. They don't sell ads (well, iAds, but that pathetic thing should be put out to pasture, or taken to the back and shot. The only reasonable explanation for why it's still around is Google is paying Apple to keep up the illusion of competition). They don't really care about content, though they do note iTunes music revenue is falling as people are switching from buying to renting/streaming.
Apple knows where they're headed. It's in selling stuff to consumers, hopefully with an interface that's well thought out.
Valve needs to put out their controller and that's pretty much it. Most Steam users who want to use a PC in the living room are going to build their own rigs. Alienware even mentioned that there's not a heck of a lot in it for them (http://www.gamespot.com/articles/alienware-s-steam-machine-will-be-their-least-profitable-system-ever/1100-6419770/). The whole issue doesn't feel that important.
Of course there's not a lot in it for the PC makers. Think of what a console is - a box that you buy that typically lasts say, 5 years if you ignore early adopters.
Well, that means you need a PC that costs $500 and is good for 5 years. That limits your options severely because it means midrange graphics card, midrange processor, midrange amount of RAM, etc. People just aren't going to buy those $1200 steam boxes with the top end graphics and processors just like they aren't buying them as regular PCs today.
So in the end, you have a PC that's trying to cost the same as an expensive console (by the time the Steamboxes come out, you can bet both the Xbone and PS4 are going to be cheaper) in order to compete, and it's going to have to last just as long because people don't want to upgrade.
So in the end, all you really have is a PC with a special controller. And controllers got nearly wiped out because Microsoft decided to release their Xbox360 one for PCs, putting a fairly nice controller in the hands of the population (including wireless).
And controllers aren't easy. In fact, they're remarkably easy to screw up - see all the cheap ass controllers that cost $40 out there. Even 3rd party console controllers are well known to feel like crap, work like crap, etc., all to save $20 over the cost of a first party controller.
And Microsoft spent a ton of money revising the Xbone controller. Sony spent less, but that's just because there were so many flaws with the PS3 controller that any change would be an improvement.
The price fixing game on ebooks has been crazy, and with the advent of "e-books" we would assume that the costs of books goes down because distribution is so cheap. At least that's what we would think if the economy was working normally.
Except distribution is cheap. It averages under 10% the price of a book on average.
The real costs with publishing is the bunch of work that goes into transforming an author's lump of words into what people generally call a book.
First, you need an editor. You'd think authors would use spell check and stuff, but they don't. Then there are the ones that rely on it a bit TOO much (I read a self-published one that routinely mixed up "censor" with "sensor"). This is not an easy job - an editor who does too much can be accused of tampering with the author's work, so they usually err on the side of caution and try to find/fix/review the most egregious errors (who knows if the author intended for some to be deliberate?)
Second, you need a typesetter. That lump of words may be split up into chapters, but you can bet the styles aren't properly set, so they need to be re-set using a style template, text re-flowed and all that (yes, many people still hit "return" at the end of a line rather than rely on word wrap). Plus images need to be laid out and referenced properly. And foot/end notes properly set up. In a technical work, there may be stylesheets available, but even then some areas just do not follow.
The editor has to check the typeset work as well to make sure the typesetter didn't make mistakes, too.
Then there's all the other matter pages that need to be created - tables of contents, figures, indices and such (no, authors rarely provide those).
And then there's the cover artist, the author's bio and other materials that have to be added, marketing plans if you're well known, etc.
The only thing ebooks save on are the actual printing, shipping and warehousing. In fact, typesetting is particularly important on ebooks because the auto-typesetter on most readers generally stink, so you need to properly typeset the book to help it out and have the content at least appear somewhat half-decent. Nothing worse than a inline image suddenly causing the text to not flow properly around it, so you end up with an image and several pages of text where the lines are barely a word wide.
Same goes for the cover art - if you're reading on a tablet, you have full color available. If you're reading on an e-ink screen, you generally only have 4 level (black, dark grey, light grey, white) shading to go with it, and relying on the auto-scaler and shader can mean you get a black blob instead of a nice cover.
Beats headphones sound shit compared to much cheaper competitors, so apparently the logo is worth billions.
Then again, they can't possibly sound worse than say, the standard Apple earbuds that Apple provides.
Granted, the Apple ones are "free", but you can also buy them separately, and are universally considered to be shit.
As for Beats, well, I know a few people who like them. Apparently they sound like shit except for specific music types. Overcompressed popular beat heavy music apparently sounds decent. Of course, I don't particularly like that sort of music, so I can't really say if that music sounds good.
Though, the Beats DSP technology does have advantages - tablets and phones that use it generally do sound better and less tinny from the built in speaker. While Apple's acoustics in their tablets and phones is generally good (compared to many other devices), they still do sound tinny at the louder volumes.
So there's a chance that iDevices could sound better from the built in speakers, as can their laptops and desktops.
Of course, they were acquired for the licensing agreements most likely...
And it's entirely possible Beats will continue as a separate company, and not folded into Apple. After all, Google distances itself from the fact that they own a ton of ad networks as well (especially the likes of DoubleClick, known for their popups and popunder ads). So Apple could do the same just as well.
Or maybe do everyone a favor and discontinue the headphones.
Yet nVidia expects us to believe that AMD is not disadvantaged by now being unable to see source code. It's your typical nVidia anti-competitive bullshit. nVidia's new agreements forbid AMD from seeing code that has GameWorks shit integrated. So AMD gets screwed over because nVidia has the larger market share and the optimization stage is typically the last part of development. Devs are under the wire and don't have time to fork/merge/redact code all over the place in order to expose a GameWorks-sanitized path for AMD's review.
nVidia really pisses me off with this bullshit. They have great performance and features, but it's ultimately to the detriment of the industry as a whole because they lock shit up so hard that it becomes a novelty that it underutilized in a fractured market (see PhysX).
Actually, the problem is nVidia has engineers to spare, and they willingly share them around to game devs. AMD doesn't have the resources to do that, so they don't have as much chances to do the optimizations that nVidia GameWorks can do.
And those nVidia engineers know their stuff inside and out - they can rewrite shaders and calls they know result in performance improvements... on nVidia cards. They don't care about non-nVidia cards, and will not debug problems in other vendor drivers.
In short, AMD can quote you word by word the OpenGL specs, while nVidia knows some of the specs don't make sense and try to figure out a more "what the OpenGL guys REALLY meant" API.
Of course, this also means that other vendor's drivers don't work too well.
Of course, AMD needs to do a GameWorks thing of their own, and to do so they need to know their drivers inside and out and cards inside and out to do it so the code flow through the driver are optimized.
There are large e-ink displays, but they all lack high resolution input - as high as a 0.5mm pencil can get you.
15 years after I graduated, I still carry engineering paper, and I get it from the same bookstore. All that's changed is I take pictures of my notes instead of scan them now.
Come on Apple - want to innovate? Figure that one out. I triple dog dare you.
Problem is, Apple was just given the smackdown by the DoJ.
No doubt they're not going to be pursuing anything that involves books or publishing for a time. (I can't imagine their iBookstore having sold many books - with all those DoJ restrictions, it might just be easier to close it, cancel everyone's licenses and just refund the money paid and save all the headaches. Face it - Amazon's already "won" - let them have their monopoly).
So yeah, Apple could make such a tablet or device, but the RoI wouldn't be that great. Plus, they'd be competing against the likes of Wacom and such
I've personally never attended a school that did not have additions, but I recognize the possibility that someone could be so stupid as to design one without making expansion possible.
Well, it's possible that the building was meant to have additions. But the additions consumed all the space that was available for it and the school still needs to expand. Except now it has to expand on parts that were never designed to have additions - e.g., the outdoor field gets encroached on, the playground area, etc.
Usually the additions get build and planning on where the next addition goes takes place. This often means the playground will have to be moved elsewhere, or other amenities shifted. Then you end up with stuff like the available open area gets shrunk and other things and before you know it, you really are out of space.
Sometimes the student population shift can be impressive - a school housing 1000 students with plans for expansion for another 400 students can see its population reach 2000 by the time the addition is completed, just by the way families migrate, immigration, etc. Or in the sanest case, open at 1400 students and be at capacity on completion rather than expecting it to fill up over the next 5 years or something.
And never mind trying to get approval to double the size of the school in the first place - going from 1000 students (at capacity) to 1400 isn't as big a stretch as trying to say that in a couple of years the student population would double.
Actually, I am amazed that nobody had that idea yet. Install a (free) game and install a, say, bitcoin miner (or whatever you can use to make money using computer cycles) as well, which runs whenever the game doesn't use 100% of the computing speed (which is most of the time, actually).
Wanna bet that 90% of gamers don't even notice that their computer is calculating for someone else, another 9% don't care as long as the game is free and the rest at best bitches about it (while still playing the game)?
It's $80. Right now it's on iOS, and presumably coming soon to Android, if it's not already there.
I suppose the only real benefit is it will try to keep you in the game - if you run of zonks 2 minutes in (a common ploy in most freemium games to get you to ante up), it doesn't serve their interests if you just quit the app and run something else,
The days of the Personal Computer is gone, the Desktop is now a serious Business workstation, reserved for the likes of Engineers, Programmers, Architects, and Finance. Where you need to do a fair amount of processing, isolated from a server so you don't need to share.
No, we still have the days of the PC.
The difference is, we don't need one PC per family member anymore. One PC per family would satisfy most families around - techies will probably go with one PC per adult.
And we're seeing it where PCs are basically stagnating, sitting in the corner unused while tablets and smartphones serve as the daily use model for most people. For the odd task that they don't satisfy, the PC is there.
But I don't see the PC fading like the mainframe. First, mainframes were relegated to special data centers and owned by a few. Whereas most families (at least the ones that matter) have 2 or more PCs - one for mom, one for dad, one for the kids, etc. And that model will change to probably one for everyone to use when they need it - e.g., school work.
The PC still has its uses, but the need for everyone to have their own "personal" one over sharing one has dropped significantly.
I would be very surprised if Samsung even planned on collecting this data; when Nokia were shipping phone models with sports biometric sensors about five years ago, they had every opportunity to develop a huge database of useful information, but lacked the resources, knowledge and will to do so. It's a cute little value-added gizmo like everything else they build in to their devices.
Well, I presume the phone collects and records the data, if nothing else than to offer the user a historical baseline.
Of course, given how secure Samsung code is, I wouldn't be surprised if someone finds a way to extract and upload it to a third party server...
Actually, not only is this common in humans, but the "fix" is the same for neural networks as it is in humans. When you misidentify a paper bag as a dog, you only do so for a split second. Then it moves (or you move, or your eyes move - they constantly vibrate so that the picture isn't static!), and you get another slightly different image milliseconds later which the brain does identify correctly (or at least, tells your brain "wait a minute there's a confusing exception here, let's turn the head and try a different angle).
The neural network "problem" they're talking about was while identifying a single image frame. In the context of a robot or autonomous car, the same process a human goes through above would correct the issue within milliseconds, because confusing and/or misleading frames (at the level we're talking about here) are rare. Think of it as a realtime error detection algorithm.
For some humans, it's a smack in the head, though.
The human wetware is powerful but easy to mislead. For example, the face-recognition bit in human vision is extremely easy to fool - or why we see a face on the Moon, or a face on a rock on Mars, or Jesus on toast, a potato chip, or whatever.
Human vision is especially vulnerable - see optical illusions. The resolution of the human eye is quite low (approx. 1MP concentrated in a tiny area of central vision, and another 1MP for peripheral vision), however, the vision system is coordinated with e motor system to control eye muscles so the eyeball moves ~200 times a second to get a higher resolution image from a low-resolution camera (which results in an image that is approximately 40+MP over the entire visual field).
But then you have blind spots which the wetware interpolates (to great amusement at times), and annoying, habits like unidentifiable objects that are potentially in our way can lead to target fixation while the brain attempts to identify.
Hell, humans are very vulnerable to this - the brain is wired for pattern recognition, and seeing patterns where there is none is a VERY common human habit.
Fact tis, the only reason we're not constantly making errors is because we do just that - we take more glances and more time to look closer to give more input to the recognition system.
Likewise, an autonomous vehicle would have plenty of information to derive recognition from - including a history of frames. These vehicles will have a past history of the images it received and processed, and the new anomalous ones could be temporally compared with images before and after.
How does this have to do with Apple using or not using OpenSSL? Right now the source of the attack is unknown but speculation is that people reuse their username (email) and passwords from other sites that have been compromised. So if someone has a list of yahoo credentials from heartbleed they might be able to take over someone's Apple account regardless if Apple used or did not use OpenSSL.
Hell, it could very well be a phishing attack - a couple of months ago I've been getting a ton of "Apple ID confirmation" and other crap email asking you to "verify" your Apple ID with Apple.
It's slowed down or gone now, but that could also very well be the problem. (Yes, those phishes were pretty obvious, but some were quite good).
Heck, I've gotten them in FRENCH, too. That one was interesting. (In Canada, the typical standard is one email in both English and French, but this was French only).
I wouldn't be surprised if this wasn't the result of said phishing attack.
USB3.0 Device end will except USB1.1 cables. That's right your "depreciated" USB-B cable will still work with the latest and greatest USB3.0 device. Just like USB micro-B cable will work with USB3.0 devices as well. Want to look at the other side of it? Well the USB3.0 host side plug was specifically designed to accept all cables back to the USB1.0 standard.
You miss the point, because you know what? Every iDevice since 2003 also plugs into a USB A port! Compatibility!
No, a USB A-B cable will NOT work with your cellphone. The B end does not fit.
The dock connector, lightning, whatever are the "device" ends of the cable. Those have changed significantly requiring investments in new cables.
I have USB A-B, USB A-miniB, USB A-microB, USB A-microB 3.0 and USB A-B 3.0 cables. The latter two aren't needed, but if I want to be able to plug into anything that accepts a USB cable, I have to carry 3 cables. Or one cable and two adapters, because the cable that goes into my Android phone or tablet doesn't plug into my hard drive (mini B, or regular B).
Well, not exactly. But certainly if you proposed having a computer onboard in 1961, the first reaction would be: The B52 is big but it's not that big!
Second would be "What would you do with one?"
You would be surprised, but there were computers onboard at the time. Not digital ones though - analog ones. And most likely only partially electronic - usually just a collection of gears and gyros.
The computer is for aiding the bombardier with targeting the weapons - it gets as inputs the plane's direction, airspeed, windspeed (or groundspeed), etc. and drives a bombsight for aiming purposes
Crude, but they work.
Digital computers didn't make headway into aircraft until the mid to late 70s or so, though analog computers still ruled, this time instead of being huge mechanical beasts, they shrunk down to analog electronic computers. (Hint: thank you op-amps. The "operation" part does computations like addition, subtraction, integration, differentiation, multiplication, division, etc).
So I'll have to rewire my house every couple of years when they change from one proprietary cable standard to another?
iPod: Firewire. Buy lots of firewire connectors. Newer iPod/iPhone: Dock connector. Toss all of your firewire accessories and move to dock connectors. Newer iPhones: Lightning connector. Toss all of your dock connector accessories, move to lightning.
Everyone else gets to stick with USB that doesn't carry a $10 premium per cable/device because Apple just invented another proprietary standard.
And USB has changed standards 3 times since then as well.
Firewire - well, we had USB 1.1 and the gigantic USB B connector. (2001)
Dock connector - we still have gigantic USB B connector. Dock connector adds USB support as well. (2003).
Meanwhile, USB introduces USB mini-B connector. Sees Firewire, goes beserk and introduces USB OTG and USB mini-A and mini-AB connectors.
Somewhere along here, Apple deprecates Firewire as a data interface, but keeps it as a charging interface.
USB sees people using mini-A and mini-AB connectors without implementing full USB OTG spec and deprecates connectors. At same time, USB introduces USB micro A, AB and B connectors.
Apple deprecates Firewire charging now.
Apple decides Dock connector is too full of legacy for its needs, introduces new lightning connector and adapters, 2012.
USB sees Lightning has many advantages of Micro B, introduces USB 3.1 universal connector.
So the dock connector had a good run - it's over 10 years old, doesn't support what people want these days (no HDMI, for example) and been stable. In the meantime, USB decides to change the cables it uses several times over.
I still have piles of USB A-B, USB A-mini-B and am slowly building up a collection of SB A-micro-B cables. But USB 3.1 will introduce a new incompatible set of cables, requiring more adapters. Sorta like how Apple has lightning to dock adapters (which if you only need USB, are stupidly cheap at like $3-4).
I even ignore USB 3.0's expanded and incompatible cables - you can't plug a USB 3.0 cable into anything that doesn't support USB 3.0. You can plug USB pre-3.0 cables into USB 3.0 devices though. The saving grace is that USB 3.0 cables are rarer so you're far more likely to pull a USB 2.0 cable than a USB 3.0 one.
USB has gone through more changes in its plugs than Apple in the same period. And it's a standard.
While publishers are middlemen, at least they are at least some level of quality control. As an Amazon top reviewer, I get several times a week solicitations to review a book self-published through Amazon, and the vast majority of these are appallingly bad -- mispellings and grammatical errors abound, the typesetting is goofy, and in terms of style these authors could not write themselves out of a paper bag. An established publisher would reject the majority of these, saving consumers the time spent finding out that they are dreck, and for the small minority of authors with fledgling talent, there would be an editor who could propose changes for the better.
Publishers do a lot, actually. All the author has to do is dump the publisher a block of text. That's it.
The publisher's job is to wrangle up an editor to punch that text into something readable (while trying to maintain the author's vision), then wrangle a typesetter to put that text into blocks - properly formatted chapters, section headings, images with captions (and the odd forgotten image that needs to be retrieved).
Then there are the extra matter - table of contents, indices, "about the author" bios and other matter that gets added (copyrights, ISBNs, etc). And then cover art needs to be produced by an artist. And try to catch things like low-resolution images that haven't been replaced which come out as pixelated crap in the final output.
All that is then taken and the book is typeset - laying the tables and text in the proper styles and everything. Even ebooks are typeset to ensure that the text generally flows correctly, images line up, etc.
Publishers do a lot. Self-publishers have to do the rest, but in general, an author is responsible for just producing the text, the publisher does everything to beat that text into something readable and wrapping it up as necessary.
And authors can produce some strange text - some use plain old ASCII and do oddball markups, Others just bold/italic/change font sizes (it's the editor's job to figure out if that's a chapter break for the typesetter to properly format), etc.
Printing is such a small part of books that most of the cost is everything else, hence why most ebooks actually aren't that much cheaper in the end - all that work still exists on the ebook as well - you just save on the printing/warehousing/shipping which at most is 10%.
They don't provide the moral context, then wonder why their kids get out of control.
If this was true, there would be plenty of data with a positive correlation between game playing and immoral behavior. Can you point to any evidence that shows that games cause kids to "get out of control"?
Perhaps that's why every study is inconclusive, actually.
The reality is, the military uses games to desensitize soldiers so pulling the trigger is much easier - the training is dehumanizing the other side. It's well studied that video games are an effective method of this and it's a regular part of soldier training.
However, in a less controlled context, like letting your kid play GTA or whatever, the outcomes are not that ever kid goes on a rampage. Why? Could be because most kids are brought up in environments where actual parenting takes place, so the context of the game is well, it's a game and don't you dare do it in real life.
However, for a small minority few or those whose parents are more absent from their lives, lacking proper moral guidance may lead them to a warped sense of reality. Of course, a supportive environment (e.g., a friend) could very easily steer the kid the right way, as in "this is fun, play and not real life".
Then you have the broken homes where the family isn't there and whatever happens.
Which explains why all sorts of video game studies are all over the map, and the question can never be definitively answered. (And probably because the question being hypothesized is slightly different as well).
Of course, the fact is, the vast majority of kids who play these games generally play under good parenting - hence why we don't have huge gangs of kids shooting everything up the street.
A Chinese console has to compete with rampant piracy. It needs a large game library at a low price per title. It's not going to be the PS4. The PS2 is too old now. I predict an evenslimmer PS3.
Well, the PS3 is completely open to pirates - the master keys are completely public all the way to the boot ROM. And those keys can't be changed without breaking compatibility with every game out there already rendering it even more useless.
OTOH, Japan got a new PS Vita - the Vita TV between the NA launch of the PS4 until the Japanese launch. The Vita has not been cracked yet and I presume it's doing better, so...
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The problem is, corrupted binaries would be found out really easily.
First of all, we know you can produce the exact same binaries of TrueCrypt from the source code. The audit proved that.
With that, if you have a set of binaries, signed or not, you should be able to reproduce that binary with the source code. If you can't, it means the binary you have was not built from the source code you have
I.e., that binary is not trustworthy - do not use it.
But if you can repro the binary from source, it means the source and binary match, which means if there is something inside the binary, it would be in the source. Which means all you need to do is diff the source code from the previous version.
Thus making the whole signing key thing completely pointless and a red herring as you can bet TrueCrypt binaries and source will be cross verified by many people to begin with.
The only way to get around this is if the compilers are compromised in the classic attack.
Binaries reproducible via source code is important, it's why the TrueCrypt audit did it as the first thing. Once you have that, it can be re-verified easily and continually, proving the binaries and source correlate. From there, you can diff the sources to verify backdoors.
And all a user has to do is wait a few days after release when all the people much smarter do their analysis.
Yes, because it does simplify stuff.
The minimum remotes is 2 - cable box and TV. But then there's all the other stuff - you have game consoles (PS3, Xbox360, PS4, Xbone), Blu-Ray players, Rokus, etc.
In fact, what simplifies it down is that they ALL connect to the A/V receiver, so the only TV control needed is on/off.
But now you have to deal with remote controls for the Blu-Ray player, Roku (which is incompatible with consumer IR), and A/V receiver. PS3 remote was thankfully eliminated with the Blu-Ray player.
The hard part isn't operating the system - turn on the TV, turn on the A/V receiver, and press the appropriate input. Say "TV" for cable box, or "Blu-Ray" for the Blu-Ray.
The hard part is managing the number of remotes. Why should I have to remember that I'm watching a Blu-Ray and have to hit the pause button on it? The logitechs (which just require a bit of time to set up) mean I hit pause, the video stops. Doesn't matter if it's the cable box, or Blu-ray player, or whatever.
Generally speaking, basics are tax-exempt. At least the base foods - prepared and processed foods are generally taxed.
And sales taxes are among the most efficient of all taxes - for every dollar in sales tax collected, the impact to the economy is around $0.05 or so (i.e., the economy would be bigger by 5 cents had that dollar not been taken).
Income taxes though are the most disruptive - for every dollar collected, it costs the economy $1.05 or more (i.e., the economy loses $1.05 for every dollar collected).
Only if you can afford a seedbox, because seeding a private tracker can mean to even get a 1:1 ratio requires seeding for years. Yes, years because all the seeders are using seedboxes on GigE links and thus get big-ass ratios while you struggle to just get 1:1.
Perhaps what private trackers need is to stop counting uploads beyond say, 4:1 or so to give everyone else a chance to get some upload going. Or to give the excess to other participants in the swarm
I quit participating in a lot of private trackers that were like this - the only way people could actually get ratio was during periods of "upload only" events or free 5 GB deals.
No, they expected the "MADE IN THE USA!" and "USA! USA! USA!" labels to sell it. It was also more a political move than a manufacturing one - namely Google wanted to prove their superiority to a certain fruity competitor that "you can manufacture in the US with not problems! See!"
Except well, it didn't turn out that way.
And in fact, Google is pretty piss-poor at manufacturing - did you SEE the factory? Rows and rows of workers (most likely illegal immigrants) manually hand-assembling everything, like they took a factory in China and moved it in the US. You can't do that in the US for a mass-manufactured item. You must automate, automate, automate. (And a factory job like this is the dullest thing in the world - you won't find many Americans clamoring to put tab A in slot B 8 hours a day for minimum wage).
After you automate, the costs go down significantly, and you can find people who actually want to do the job because maintaining automation is a skilled job that pays well.
I think we saw this with the Nexus Q, too.
Except it was available to be sold direct to consumers.
And Google is a big enough to company that they don't have to be beholden to carriers - they can do what Apple did and offer to sell it direct, unlocked. Especially since Google has a perfect sales venue for it - the Google Play store.
Of course, the big problem is Google can't sling atoms around like they can electrons - shopping for stuff at Google Play is an exercise in frustration at times and feels like an amateurish exercise compared to even the app store side.
That, and Google really needs to open retail stores. That sell stuff directly to walk-in customers. So like the Apple Store where everything on display can be bought then and there. And not like the Samsung or Microsoft stores that barely have anything and what they do sell can be random, and they'd much rather chase you to a store to sell you a phone than sell you an unlocked one right there.
The problem is, it doesn't make sense.
First of all, Lavabit is a bad example because they used one encryption key for everything - hence the FBI's request for all user's email because it's impossible to isolate just one mailbox. That was a Lavabit fault (one would reasonably assumed there was no master key involved).
TrueCrypt though doesn't have a "master key" - there is no one key that when disclosed will unlock every TrueCrypt volume out there. (At least, that's what the preliminary audit reports say).
And given the nature of TrueCrypt, it would be a challenge to implement such a backdoor - the audit verified that it's possible to recreate the binaries from the source.
And there's no real update in over 2 years. A NSL that forces them to implement something that sends the master key to the NSA would be known - it's not like people won't diff the source code or build and compare to see if there were holes.
And the audit itself didn't reveal anything big or major.
A more likely reason cropped up when someone claiming to be a TrueCrypt developer stepped up and claimed boredom as the reason. Basically the developers were burned out and didn't want to do it anymore. Perhaps some of the minor flaws in the audit would be too boring to fix, for example.
So why the announcement? Because unsupported it IS less secure - eventually more holes and vulnerabilities will turn up and it might be fatal. Better to get everyone off it rather than believing their data is secure against unknown future attacks.
And other people are trying to resurrect/fork it, trying to get all the legal ducks in a row to meet the requirements of the license.
Because bluetooth is f'in annoying.
The PS3 demonstrated that because it used a remote completely incompatible with home systems. Everything uses consumer IR to control them. So there's a huge industry around consumer IR.
Bluetooth remotes screw that up - sure you could buy $100 converters (well, $60 thanks to Logitech obsoleting every other device out there), but those are annoying.
So now, I have a nice remote that controls my TV, my AV receiver, my cable box, my TiVo, my Xbox, my Blu-Ray player. But now to watch f'in Netflix on my Roku, I have to pick up a second remote just to control it. Just so I can use it with headphones. But now I need two remotes.
If I cared to have two remotes, I might as well just have separate remotes for everything - two remotes, five remotes, what's the difference? Significant other will still call you saying things don't work because they picked up the wrong remote.
What makes you think Google is seeing the writing on the wall? As far as anyone's concerned, Google's investment in home automation and such are to plaster more ads in non-traditional places.
Think about it - driverless cars means you can plaster the inside and outside with ads, AND get location information of those vehicles and their users. Internet balloons - there's nothing wrong with giving more internet to more people, especially if it means more eyeballs to see ads. Home automation/thermostats - well, now there's a treasure trove of information there - and eyeball space. Knowing the house habits of people inside, being able to show ads on the thermostat, etc.
Amazon's just expanding its reach. I mean, once they get people hooked on AWS and everything, they can start to leverage them to "get a better deal" (see Hachette).
I mean, once they've got your data, you're their bitch.
Apple? They rely neither on ads nor services for revenue. They don't sell ads (well, iAds, but that pathetic thing should be put out to pasture, or taken to the back and shot. The only reasonable explanation for why it's still around is Google is paying Apple to keep up the illusion of competition). They don't really care about content, though they do note iTunes music revenue is falling as people are switching from buying to renting/streaming.
Apple knows where they're headed. It's in selling stuff to consumers, hopefully with an interface that's well thought out.
Of course there's not a lot in it for the PC makers. Think of what a console is - a box that you buy that typically lasts say, 5 years if you ignore early adopters.
Well, that means you need a PC that costs $500 and is good for 5 years. That limits your options severely because it means midrange graphics card, midrange processor, midrange amount of RAM, etc. People just aren't going to buy those $1200 steam boxes with the top end graphics and processors just like they aren't buying them as regular PCs today.
So in the end, you have a PC that's trying to cost the same as an expensive console (by the time the Steamboxes come out, you can bet both the Xbone and PS4 are going to be cheaper) in order to compete, and it's going to have to last just as long because people don't want to upgrade.
So in the end, all you really have is a PC with a special controller. And controllers got nearly wiped out because Microsoft decided to release their Xbox360 one for PCs, putting a fairly nice controller in the hands of the population (including wireless).
And controllers aren't easy. In fact, they're remarkably easy to screw up - see all the cheap ass controllers that cost $40 out there. Even 3rd party console controllers are well known to feel like crap, work like crap, etc., all to save $20 over the cost of a first party controller.
And Microsoft spent a ton of money revising the Xbone controller. Sony spent less, but that's just because there were so many flaws with the PS3 controller that any change would be an improvement.
Except distribution is cheap. It averages under 10% the price of a book on average.
The real costs with publishing is the bunch of work that goes into transforming an author's lump of words into what people generally call a book.
First, you need an editor. You'd think authors would use spell check and stuff, but they don't. Then there are the ones that rely on it a bit TOO much (I read a self-published one that routinely mixed up "censor" with "sensor"). This is not an easy job - an editor who does too much can be accused of tampering with the author's work, so they usually err on the side of caution and try to find/fix/review the most egregious errors (who knows if the author intended for some to be deliberate?)
Second, you need a typesetter. That lump of words may be split up into chapters, but you can bet the styles aren't properly set, so they need to be re-set using a style template, text re-flowed and all that (yes, many people still hit "return" at the end of a line rather than rely on word wrap). Plus images need to be laid out and referenced properly. And foot/end notes properly set up. In a technical work, there may be stylesheets available, but even then some areas just do not follow.
The editor has to check the typeset work as well to make sure the typesetter didn't make mistakes, too.
Then there's all the other matter pages that need to be created - tables of contents, figures, indices and such (no, authors rarely provide those).
And then there's the cover artist, the author's bio and other materials that have to be added, marketing plans if you're well known, etc.
The only thing ebooks save on are the actual printing, shipping and warehousing. In fact, typesetting is particularly important on ebooks because the auto-typesetter on most readers generally stink, so you need to properly typeset the book to help it out and have the content at least appear somewhat half-decent. Nothing worse than a inline image suddenly causing the text to not flow properly around it, so you end up with an image and several pages of text where the lines are barely a word wide.
Same goes for the cover art - if you're reading on a tablet, you have full color available. If you're reading on an e-ink screen, you generally only have 4 level (black, dark grey, light grey, white) shading to go with it, and relying on the auto-scaler and shader can mean you get a black blob instead of a nice cover.
Then again, they can't possibly sound worse than say, the standard Apple earbuds that Apple provides.
Granted, the Apple ones are "free", but you can also buy them separately, and are universally considered to be shit.
As for Beats, well, I know a few people who like them. Apparently they sound like shit except for specific music types. Overcompressed popular beat heavy music apparently sounds decent. Of course, I don't particularly like that sort of music, so I can't really say if that music sounds good.
Though, the Beats DSP technology does have advantages - tablets and phones that use it generally do sound better and less tinny from the built in speaker. While Apple's acoustics in their tablets and phones is generally good (compared to many other devices), they still do sound tinny at the louder volumes.
So there's a chance that iDevices could sound better from the built in speakers, as can their laptops and desktops.
Of course, they were acquired for the licensing agreements most likely...
And it's entirely possible Beats will continue as a separate company, and not folded into Apple. After all, Google distances itself from the fact that they own a ton of ad networks as well (especially the likes of DoubleClick, known for their popups and popunder ads). So Apple could do the same just as well.
Or maybe do everyone a favor and discontinue the headphones.
Actually, the problem is nVidia has engineers to spare, and they willingly share them around to game devs. AMD doesn't have the resources to do that, so they don't have as much chances to do the optimizations that nVidia GameWorks can do.
And those nVidia engineers know their stuff inside and out - they can rewrite shaders and calls they know result in performance improvements... on nVidia cards. They don't care about non-nVidia cards, and will not debug problems in other vendor drivers.
Source: http://tech.slashdot.org/story... Original Source: http://richg42.blogspot.ca/201...
In short, AMD can quote you word by word the OpenGL specs, while nVidia knows some of the specs don't make sense and try to figure out a more "what the OpenGL guys REALLY meant" API.
Of course, this also means that other vendor's drivers don't work too well.
Of course, AMD needs to do a GameWorks thing of their own, and to do so they need to know their drivers inside and out and cards inside and out to do it so the code flow through the driver are optimized.
Problem is, Apple was just given the smackdown by the DoJ.
No doubt they're not going to be pursuing anything that involves books or publishing for a time. (I can't imagine their iBookstore having sold many books - with all those DoJ restrictions, it might just be easier to close it, cancel everyone's licenses and just refund the money paid and save all the headaches. Face it - Amazon's already "won" - let them have their monopoly).
So yeah, Apple could make such a tablet or device, but the RoI wouldn't be that great. Plus, they'd be competing against the likes of Wacom and such
Well, it's possible that the building was meant to have additions. But the additions consumed all the space that was available for it and the school still needs to expand. Except now it has to expand on parts that were never designed to have additions - e.g., the outdoor field gets encroached on, the playground area, etc.
Usually the additions get build and planning on where the next addition goes takes place. This often means the playground will have to be moved elsewhere, or other amenities shifted. Then you end up with stuff like the available open area gets shrunk and other things and before you know it, you really are out of space.
Sometimes the student population shift can be impressive - a school housing 1000 students with plans for expansion for another 400 students can see its population reach 2000 by the time the addition is completed, just by the way families migrate, immigration, etc. Or in the sanest case, open at 1400 students and be at capacity on completion rather than expecting it to fill up over the next 5 years or something.
And never mind trying to get approval to double the size of the school in the first place - going from 1000 students (at capacity) to 1400 isn't as big a stretch as trying to say that in a couple of years the student population would double.
Actually, there is a Bitcoin miner for Unity mobile games. Yes, mobile games. As in the ones you play on your smartphone and tablet.
It's $80. Right now it's on iOS, and presumably coming soon to Android, if it's not already there.
I suppose the only real benefit is it will try to keep you in the game - if you run of zonks 2 minutes in (a common ploy in most freemium games to get you to ante up), it doesn't serve their interests if you just quit the app and run something else,
No, we still have the days of the PC.
The difference is, we don't need one PC per family member anymore. One PC per family would satisfy most families around - techies will probably go with one PC per adult.
And we're seeing it where PCs are basically stagnating, sitting in the corner unused while tablets and smartphones serve as the daily use model for most people. For the odd task that they don't satisfy, the PC is there.
But I don't see the PC fading like the mainframe. First, mainframes were relegated to special data centers and owned by a few. Whereas most families (at least the ones that matter) have 2 or more PCs - one for mom, one for dad, one for the kids, etc. And that model will change to probably one for everyone to use when they need it - e.g., school work.
The PC still has its uses, but the need for everyone to have their own "personal" one over sharing one has dropped significantly.
Well, I presume the phone collects and records the data, if nothing else than to offer the user a historical baseline.
Of course, given how secure Samsung code is, I wouldn't be surprised if someone finds a way to extract and upload it to a third party server...
For some humans, it's a smack in the head, though.
The human wetware is powerful but easy to mislead. For example, the face-recognition bit in human vision is extremely easy to fool - or why we see a face on the Moon, or a face on a rock on Mars, or Jesus on toast, a potato chip, or whatever.
Human vision is especially vulnerable - see optical illusions. The resolution of the human eye is quite low (approx. 1MP concentrated in a tiny area of central vision, and another 1MP for peripheral vision), however, the vision system is coordinated with e motor system to control eye muscles so the eyeball moves ~200 times a second to get a higher resolution image from a low-resolution camera (which results in an image that is approximately 40+MP over the entire visual field).
But then you have blind spots which the wetware interpolates (to great amusement at times), and annoying, habits like unidentifiable objects that are potentially in our way can lead to target fixation while the brain attempts to identify.
Hell, humans are very vulnerable to this - the brain is wired for pattern recognition, and seeing patterns where there is none is a VERY common human habit.
Fact tis, the only reason we're not constantly making errors is because we do just that - we take more glances and more time to look closer to give more input to the recognition system.
Likewise, an autonomous vehicle would have plenty of information to derive recognition from - including a history of frames. These vehicles will have a past history of the images it received and processed, and the new anomalous ones could be temporally compared with images before and after.
Hell, it could very well be a phishing attack - a couple of months ago I've been getting a ton of "Apple ID confirmation" and other crap email asking you to "verify" your Apple ID with Apple.
It's slowed down or gone now, but that could also very well be the problem. (Yes, those phishes were pretty obvious, but some were quite good).
Heck, I've gotten them in FRENCH, too. That one was interesting. (In Canada, the typical standard is one email in both English and French, but this was French only).
I wouldn't be surprised if this wasn't the result of said phishing attack.
You miss the point, because you know what? Every iDevice since 2003 also plugs into a USB A port! Compatibility!
No, a USB A-B cable will NOT work with your cellphone. The B end does not fit.
The dock connector, lightning, whatever are the "device" ends of the cable. Those have changed significantly requiring investments in new cables.
I have USB A-B, USB A-miniB, USB A-microB, USB A-microB 3.0 and USB A-B 3.0 cables. The latter two aren't needed, but if I want to be able to plug into anything that accepts a USB cable, I have to carry 3 cables. Or one cable and two adapters, because the cable that goes into my Android phone or tablet doesn't plug into my hard drive (mini B, or regular B).
You would be surprised, but there were computers onboard at the time. Not digital ones though - analog ones. And most likely only partially electronic - usually just a collection of gears and gyros.
The computer is for aiding the bombardier with targeting the weapons - it gets as inputs the plane's direction, airspeed, windspeed (or groundspeed), etc. and drives a bombsight for aiming purposes
Crude, but they work.
Digital computers didn't make headway into aircraft until the mid to late 70s or so, though analog computers still ruled, this time instead of being huge mechanical beasts, they shrunk down to analog electronic computers. (Hint: thank you op-amps. The "operation" part does computations like addition, subtraction, integration, differentiation, multiplication, division, etc).
And USB has changed standards 3 times since then as well.
Firewire - well, we had USB 1.1 and the gigantic USB B connector. (2001)
Dock connector - we still have gigantic USB B connector. Dock connector adds USB support as well. (2003).
Meanwhile, USB introduces USB mini-B connector. Sees Firewire, goes beserk and introduces USB OTG and USB mini-A and mini-AB connectors.
Somewhere along here, Apple deprecates Firewire as a data interface, but keeps it as a charging interface.
USB sees people using mini-A and mini-AB connectors without implementing full USB OTG spec and deprecates connectors. At same time, USB introduces USB micro A, AB and B connectors.
Apple deprecates Firewire charging now.
Apple decides Dock connector is too full of legacy for its needs, introduces new lightning connector and adapters, 2012.
USB sees Lightning has many advantages of Micro B, introduces USB 3.1 universal connector.
So the dock connector had a good run - it's over 10 years old, doesn't support what people want these days (no HDMI, for example) and been stable. In the meantime, USB decides to change the cables it uses several times over.
I still have piles of USB A-B, USB A-mini-B and am slowly building up a collection of SB A-micro-B cables. But USB 3.1 will introduce a new incompatible set of cables, requiring more adapters. Sorta like how Apple has lightning to dock adapters (which if you only need USB, are stupidly cheap at like $3-4).
I even ignore USB 3.0's expanded and incompatible cables - you can't plug a USB 3.0 cable into anything that doesn't support USB 3.0. You can plug USB pre-3.0 cables into USB 3.0 devices though. The saving grace is that USB 3.0 cables are rarer so you're far more likely to pull a USB 2.0 cable than a USB 3.0 one.
USB has gone through more changes in its plugs than Apple in the same period. And it's a standard.
Publishers do a lot, actually. All the author has to do is dump the publisher a block of text. That's it.
The publisher's job is to wrangle up an editor to punch that text into something readable (while trying to maintain the author's vision), then wrangle a typesetter to put that text into blocks - properly formatted chapters, section headings, images with captions (and the odd forgotten image that needs to be retrieved).
Then there are the extra matter - table of contents, indices, "about the author" bios and other matter that gets added (copyrights, ISBNs, etc). And then cover art needs to be produced by an artist. And try to catch things like low-resolution images that haven't been replaced which come out as pixelated crap in the final output.
All that is then taken and the book is typeset - laying the tables and text in the proper styles and everything. Even ebooks are typeset to ensure that the text generally flows correctly, images line up, etc.
Publishers do a lot. Self-publishers have to do the rest, but in general, an author is responsible for just producing the text, the publisher does everything to beat that text into something readable and wrapping it up as necessary.
And authors can produce some strange text - some use plain old ASCII and do oddball markups, Others just bold/italic/change font sizes (it's the editor's job to figure out if that's a chapter break for the typesetter to properly format), etc.
Printing is such a small part of books that most of the cost is everything else, hence why most ebooks actually aren't that much cheaper in the end - all that work still exists on the ebook as well - you just save on the printing/warehousing/shipping which at most is 10%.
Perhaps that's why every study is inconclusive, actually.
The reality is, the military uses games to desensitize soldiers so pulling the trigger is much easier - the training is dehumanizing the other side. It's well studied that video games are an effective method of this and it's a regular part of soldier training.
However, in a less controlled context, like letting your kid play GTA or whatever, the outcomes are not that ever kid goes on a rampage. Why? Could be because most kids are brought up in environments where actual parenting takes place, so the context of the game is well, it's a game and don't you dare do it in real life.
However, for a small minority few or those whose parents are more absent from their lives, lacking proper moral guidance may lead them to a warped sense of reality. Of course, a supportive environment (e.g., a friend) could very easily steer the kid the right way, as in "this is fun, play and not real life".
Then you have the broken homes where the family isn't there and whatever happens.
Which explains why all sorts of video game studies are all over the map, and the question can never be definitively answered. (And probably because the question being hypothesized is slightly different as well).
Of course, the fact is, the vast majority of kids who play these games generally play under good parenting - hence why we don't have huge gangs of kids shooting everything up the street.
Well, the PS3 is completely open to pirates - the master keys are completely public all the way to the boot ROM. And those keys can't be changed without breaking compatibility with every game out there already rendering it even more useless.
OTOH, Japan got a new PS Vita - the Vita TV between the NA launch of the PS4 until the Japanese launch. The Vita has not been cracked yet and I presume it's doing better, so...