Isn't keeping the PC game industry healthy by putting SteamBoxes in the living room the same thing as a console-killer?
The problem is, if you want to define a SteamBox as a console, the PC industry is done for.
Because the cheapest one is $500. And the CES announcements show them going to $1300. Tell me how many "cheaper games" you have to buy to justify the $800 premium over an Xbone? (Especially since well, both PSN and Xbox Live also run sales).
And how long are they going to last? I mean, the Xbone and PS4 are going to probably last at least 5 years (the past gen PS3 and Xbox360 are pushing 7 and 8 years). Will today's $500 SteamBox last 5 years? Or are PC developers going to say 2 years from now "Today's steambox is super cool, let's target it!" and leave everyone who bought a $500 SteamBox in the dust?
And nevermind the Tier 1 PC maker who integrates it all on a motherboard and releases it for $400, screwing over everyone who paid $500. If you're going to subject your console to wild price differentials and all that, there better be a good reason other than technical gobbledegook. Titan this, 386 that 6970 over there, foobarbaz. Sorry, people will see "SteamBox" and expect them to work alike. They're buying a console, not a PC.
If Valve plays this wrong, PC developers might need to support Intel 5000 graphics (Haswell) for the next 5+ years running at 1080p because those were the cheapest.
If Valve wants these as gaming PCs, they need to be put near the PCs side. Unfortunately, the way they're positioned now, they're competing against consoles. And outside the big three, the only console maker to have some success is... Apple (more inadvertently than anything). Even the heavily hyped Ouya is struggling.
Reset password, follow emailed link, and the account is now yours. And, bonus if it's already been paid for.
Funny enough, I had it happen to me with British Telecom and apparently some university in Colorado.
But for both of them, I couldn't use the password reset link - each time I tried, it gave me "email address is not recognized" which when I look at the headers, no it's not. No + addressing or anything - I just copied and pasted the email address from the header.
One of the ironies is that BT is sending me personal details about their account - I know they have a moderate DSL link, a couple of phone lines, they are a business, etc., and I was even given their real mailing address! And after all the EU nonsense about privacy! They're just emailing all the details to me in the clear, to a US routed e-mail server! (My domain is hosted in the US).
The Colorado university one I didn't understand - they were sending me all sorts of notices and such, but I certainly couldn't log in or recover password. Oddly, I could unsubscribe just fine.
And my domain isn't the sort that I'd expect people would accidentally enter (being a.net to begin with and while only 4 characters, is still unrelated to any subject I could think of, so it's not like people would accidentally make a typo or something).
And those were two of the more notable ones.
All I know is, apparently a mining engineer and a business in the UK are probably wondering where their email is.
Unfortunately, I can't be bothered to do anything but mark it as spam.
Well, natively, many 4K monitors these days are actually two monitors, from the controllers' point of view (for some reason, 4K panel controllers weren't viable until recently, so two were used), so it shouldn't be too hard to have Windows and the driver ignore the fact that it's a single screen.
No, the reason is that 4K monitors ran at 30Hz. Yes, last year's HDMI 1.4 4K TVs did so at 30Hz (30fps). Because that was the same bandwidth as 1080p60 3D (showing two 1080p frames 60 times a second is the same as one with double the dimensions and halving the framerate).
If you do dual controllers you can have 4K @ 60fps, which is probably somewhat more desirable. Depending on the video card, operating at 30fps can be a real pain because Windows oddly becomes less responsive.
Single controller 4K should be doable these days with HDMI 2.0 - but now you need new monitors and video cards.
Really? You have reliable estimates of the costs, or is it just your ideology that tells you it must be true? Similarly, if we require all diesel fuel sold in this country to be ULSD, it will raise costs enormously. Oh, that's right, even the oil companies say it only costs $0.07/gallon.
Depends on the level of traceability desired. You want to know why a bolt for an aircraft is $5 each, versus probably the exact same bolt you can buy at Home Depot for $2/lb (or probably under 10 cents each)?
It's traceability. That aircraft bolt is serial numbered. You can take that serial number to the manufacturer, and they will tell you the batch of steel extrusion it came from. You can take that batch number, go to the forge, and look it up. That'll tell you where the steel came from - was it new steel? Recycled steel? If it's new steel, they can trace it to the mine that produced the iron ore, and probably that mine can even tell you where the iron ore came from. If it's recycled, they can tell you which facility supplied them the recycled parts, and you can probably take that to the original recycler and they can tell you what went into it. If not, they can still produce quality analysis and lab reports showing the composition of the steel when it was forged, on what date and all that stuff.
Fully traceable, and you can do that for any part. Oh yeah, you can also take that serial number for the bolt, and see where it came from - if it was a recycled bolt from something else. What aircraft it came from (type and all that), why it was removed, etc. (And yes, you do get counterfeit parts entering the system - usually because it's traced back to a few companies who do it and they admit it).
The problem is - what kind of traceability is the SEC wanting? Do they want the ability to take a computer, break it down to its parts, then go to the manufacturer with each serial number and trace it back to the raw minerals? Because that's aircraft like traceability.
Or do they just want a "we buy our parts from DigiKey, who promise us the parts are conflict-free"? Which is extremely lightweight and doable with existing systems - since they have the orders for parts so they can look up what parts were ordered from DigiKey and verify that the DigiKey catalog says they are conflict free. They can cross reference the orders with the actual DigiKey order and verify how DigiKey verifies that they're conflict free and see DigiKey's orders for that part, then go to the supplier and verify, and so on. So they're not tracing that every single part is definitely conflict free, but the parts were ordered on the belief they were conflict free.
The second level of verification is cheap - it costs nothing because the companies are already maintaining those records - they order conflict-free parts form a supplier, the supplier gives them supposedly conflict free parts, end of story. You can audit the supplier to see where they got them from and then the manufacturer.
At no point can they guarantee it - perhaps the manufacturer decided to cheat and mislabel them.
Of course, you know what? You can bet Apple will be among the first to rise to the challenge, again in a show of "we're better than all of you" since everyone else still hasn't even gotten to the laundry list that Apple gives (purely for marketing to Greenpeace - everyone else "greener" is really just talk, no action , resulting in Apple getting dinged despite them being "better").
Because strictly speaking, Silk Road is a marketplace and not a retailer, as it's in the business of connecting independent vendors with customers.
It was also a payment facilitator. Silk Road was more like eBay+Paypal combined, with the exception that you MUST use the Silk Road to pay the seller.
The 27,000 BTC that the FBI seized were such in-transit money - it was escrow money that buyers sent to the Silk Road to pay the sellers in trust. (Of course, Silk Road took a percentage). They still haven't found the DPR stash, worth much more.
Technically, the buyers could appeal to the FBI for the money back, but since the FBI would need to know transaction details and records (which wallet, which destination, which transaction it was for - there's full record keeping in BTC, and Silk Road had to keep temporary in-flight records while the money was in escrow), well, they'd be released and re-seized under different laws.
Also, as mentioned in the original post, companies like Cisco are considering moving their R&D to Canada where they will not be forced to include backdoors for the NSA. As someone whose main business is networking gear, I can see this as being a big selling feature to Cisco.
Actually, that's just the image they want to project.
The real reason why companies have development centres in Canada is simple - it's a LOT easier to get work visas and such in Canada! And there's a bunch of times when particular people are hard to hire in the US, but a lot easier in Canada because of visas.
So as noble as companies like Cisco are to do R&D in Canada, it's really because Canada is a lot more "easygoing" on immigration. So that Chinese worker who was denied a work visa in the US? Well, Canada gave them one, so just set up a development centre in Canada and you're golden.
A lot of companies have development centres in Canada for this reason - many set up years or even decades ago. Doing it this year? Nothing special. Of course, I don't mind (I'm in Canada) as it means damn, our workplaces are full of diversity.
And no, it's often not the Canadian equivalent of H1Bs or anything - they're people who actually immigrate to Canada (it seems you get to celebrate someone getting their citizenship several times a year or so).
The FBI is already one of the largest holders of Bitcoin, since they confiscated the assets of Silk Road.
Not really, they only have what, $27M worth of it? Around 27,000 or so?
The Winklevoss twins (of Facebook fame) have made several declarations that they own approximately 10% of all BTC out there. Since there's only ever going to be 21M BTC, that means they have close to 2M BTC. Which at current value is close to $2B USD. Of course, they acquired this a long time ago (probably around $16 or less)...
We keep hearing warnings about CMEs now that we can actually see them coming. I'm just wondering how many real-life negative effects they had in the previous decades, when we already had electronics (>15V maybe, but less ESD/SEU protection).
Sure, the general public has many more ways to notice, but it's not like there weren't scientists all around the planet keeping an eye on sensitive equipment 30 years ago.
How bad are those forecasted CMEs on modern electronics, compared to previous unexpected CMEs on old stuff? Has it turned into a convenient excuse for suppliers, should something fail that day?
They're like earthquakes - there are a lot of them, but they vary in intensity. Many are small, some are large.
The big problem is they are charged particles. When the charged particles enter the Earth magnetosphere, they distort it (moving charges, blah blah blah). Which changes the earth's magnetic field. And when you have a changing magnetic field, well, it induces current in wires, notably, nice long transmission lines we use to carry bulk power. Which trips all sorts of protective circuits because these can be quite dangerous current flows. See 1980s and Quebec Hydro, where such a CME took down the grid.
The other thing is, they're ionized particles, so when they hit surfaces, they can emit all sorts of radiation as well, which is how they can also damage satellites too.
They're fairly easy to detect (solar flares travel at the speed of light, we know 8 minutes later), but a CME is a cloud of charged energetic particles that can take hours to more than a week to arrive after said flare.
And when you're experimenting, I suppose you want to control variables - were the errornous readings caused by the CME or were they something else? It's hard to tell, and it's not like you can re-run the experiment again (too much $$$, can't set up same conditions) to see why.
And modern electronics is more vulnerable - the deep sub micron processes we use for ICs and such are far more vulnerable - transistors are using less power to switch so a bit of radiation doesn't have to be too powerful to flip a state. Or destroy it completely.
Apply 5V (or 12V, which is what old school CMOS 4xxx ICs could take easily) to your modern 1.2V CPU, and it'll pop.
Yeah, that one I don't get, unless they're afraid you're going to document something that is going to cause them problems elsewhere.
Except... doctor-patient privilege. Medical records are private, and unless you give permission, even family is not allowed to know.
So no, that embarrassing night you went out with a hooker and got HIV, well, all anyone is allowed to know (i.e., your insurance company) is you got HIV. And unless you tell your doctor it's OK, even he's professionally not allowed to tell family how you got it.
The thing is, though, there's just a bunch of taboo subjects. Things people just don't talk about. Like erectile dysfunction - just try to get any man to admit their penis doesn't "work". Or how they got that particular rash. Or anything to deal with sex.
That's one reason why patients lie - societal norms keep them from telling people. And things that are "bad" like that guy's night out where you got plastered, or whatever, well, people don't like telling others about it (until revealed by Google Glass and their associated glassholes).
Hell, even answering the question "Are you a homosexual" can explain things. But most people take offense and will lie, despite privilege.
Of course, the other reason is, well, having the doctor judge you - despite privilege, admitting you smoke, drink too much, are fat, etc, well, generally attract disdain from the medical profession.
Perhaps the time will come when as an option, you have a choice of seeing a computer doctor - one who can show disdain, but is cold, calculating and clinical so non-judgemental. Eliza was an experiment that showed that humans would often tell a computer more than they would say, their doctor.
The controller is over-engineered and silly, and apparently the SteamBox consoles themselves are going to sell for $500. That's insane. This thing isn't in the same league as an Xbox One or PS4. There are barely any games for it, and barely any announced!
No, it's not the games that are killing steambox, it's the competition.
Steamboxes start at $500 and go on up - the initial list I saw, you can get ones that go to $1400+.
Well shit, you know what? Everyone who wants to buy one (i.e., not you and me, who can install SteamOS on their own PC) will head down to Best Buy and look at it. You can get a PS4. An Xbone. Or a Steambox. Best Buy will probably carry 4 or 5 of them, all with technical gobbledogook of nVidia this, Core i5 that, blah blah blah. And no, Best Buy will not carry one that costs more than $500 because people will just laugh and walk by it.
And so you have the consumer having to choose the "best" $500 box out of the 4 or 5 in front of them. What will make the choice for them? How it looks. Because they can't make the choice!
And never mind the whole "Good" "Better" "Ultimate" strategy - the only ones most consumers will see are "Good" because they're priced like the PS4 and Xbone.
And sure, maybe the first units will sell. But take it two years later, and "Good" no longer is adequate - they're going to see people with PS4s and Xbones playing games, while they're stuck with a new SteamBox purchase or run in "Crappy" mode.
End result - developers will bitch about PS4 and Xbone graphics holding them back, but also first-gen Steamboxes as well,if they want the platform to be viable because the consumer is not going to be buying a new one in a couple of years. And no, they're not going to spend $100 to put in a new video card either ($150 with Geek Squad!).
We saw it this time around - the PS3 and Xbox 360 holding PC graphics back. The Steambox is an obvious attempt to revitalizing PC gaming (most AAA titles are ported from consoles, and if you're lucky, they release same day) as well as giving developers freedom to use high end graphics again.
And nevermind when instead of Tier 3 PC manufacturers (i.e., OEM assemblers) you have Tier 1 (they make it all - they design their own motherboards, etc) integrating all but the video card on a single board, removing excess parts, and selling what was a $500 SteamBox for $400. Or slapping it all together so its not swappable on a single board for $350.
The steambox is trying to put choice into consoles, which is the whole reason consoles exist - you go to the store, you buy it, you play it for many years and they're all the same. When you have now a dozen manufacturers with a dozen different models, and probably a half dozen more cheaper ones coming out, suddenly it doesn't look so easy for the consumer anymore.
Remember what happened when Microsoft first announced the Xbone with the always on DRM?
How Sony crucified them over offline play, easy sharing, used games, etc?
And then go an announce the PS4 will never do that?
Well, Sony was right - the PS4 won't do it. They'll put games on their streaming service which do the same thing. Minus the ONE USEFUL feature that the Xbone initially offered - the ability to sell/transfer a game license to someone else! (I.e., used game sale - sure they allowed for the possibility of blocking it or from taking a small part of the transaction fee, but it was possible).
It looks like a backhanded way of doing what the Xbone was originally going to do, and to go around any promises that were made to turn the PS4 into the always-on DRM the Xbone originally had.
Hell, I wouldn't be surprised if PS+ started putting games on there as a way to encourage game sales - my PS4 only has the free PS+ games on it. Because I know Sony will put Knack on it for free sometime soon (I want to play it), so I can save myself $60 by waiting. Of course, if this service comes online between now and then, Sony could very easily make it an online only game.
To be honest, it's also why both Microsoft and Sony need to do well - because each keeps each other honest. When Microsoft decided to err with the DRM, Sony came out and corrected them. When Sony tried to sneak away from music, Microsoft announced they supported it causing Sony to announce a future fix a few days later.
Competition is keeping both honest, and it looks like sales are steady enough to do that in the near term (4M units for the PS4, 3M for the Xbone). Sadly, Nintendo looks to be the odd man out (4M units, but a year head start).
You jest, but I'll be happy when I can know the status of every appliance, door, and window in my house from anywhere in the world, at any time. (Actual things I'm looking forward to: having the dryer ping me when it's done; making sure the front door is locked when I'm already in bed.)
And if you know the status of everything, so can someone else hack into them (what, you think these things have security?) and get status as well. And by close examination of what goes on, figure out if it's a really someone at home, or not.
And that's just monitor-only. Once you get the ability to remotely lock and unlock stuff, well now, things got a lot more interesting. Along the lines of "did you change your deadbolt in the last 6 months? If not, your deadbolt is VULNERABLE! Buy a new one to get the latest software security updates".
And even if people don't steal things, they can still go and grief you - break a window, plug up the drains, turn on the water. Flip all your breakers, etc. Especially if you're in a cold climate - what good does remote monitoring do if they broke your windows, killed your heat, and turned on the taps so everything is now icy inside and destroyed.
I especially like it when AV software flag a keygen for being a keygen. No, not because the keygen also has a trojan or whatever, but that it is a keygen. The explanation usually states "keygens may contain malware" - so, tell me whether it actually contains malware or not - maybe that's why I scanned it with the AV software...
The problem is, a lot (if not most) keygens are wrapped in ways that make it impossible to tell. After all, a wrapped keygen is a trojan, and it's so easy to do tons of things that no anti-malware can detect them call because it's so easy to do. All the trojan has to do is spawn a downloader process, then launch the real keygen, and you're none the wiser.
There's nothing any anti-malware can do about it - there's no way to tell if it's a clean keygen or a wrapped one. Heck, many of them are also packed EXEs just like the keygens themselves.
And yes, trojans are impossible to scan - your malware scanner might detect when the wrapped keygen actually downloads a known piece of malware, but that downloader will quietly run in the background until someone actually analyzes it.
I agree, the marble will still follow a curve if it sticks to the rubber in zero-g - so the curvature does change its trajectory. Usually when this is shown though,it is done in earth gravity and that is the largest effect on the marble. Even in zero-g, the analogy with GR is very thin because the curvature of the rubber sheet doesn't involve the time coordinate, so the effect on the marble's path doesn't really look like gravity in GR.
Done right the rubber sheet can be a barely OK analogy, as it is usually done though it is just confusing.
The problem is the rubber sheet is a 2D surface. It can represent two dimensions. It can be two of space (as is normal), one space and one time, etc.
Real spacetime is a 4D entity - 3 (elongated) space, 1 time. The reason we use the rubber sheet analogy is because visualizing the distortions in spacetime (a 4D entity) is quite... difficult. Even visualizing a 3D representation is quite hard (pick your mix of space and time dimensions you want to show).
However, a 2D representation is quite easy to demonstrate and show to a class so they can visualize that happens. Sure, gravity is the biggest reason why the rubber sheet curves and what causes the marble to follow the curves, but it's a remarkably intuitive image of the warping of spacetime. (Then again, gravity is what causes the warping to begin with, and while we're using the earth to warp a rubber sheet because it's convenient...).
To be honest, it isn't a rigorous mathematical model, but it was never supposed to be. It's a practical demonstration on the weirdness of spacetime and gravity, illustrated on a 2D plane because we, despite being 4D entities have a hard time imagining it.
No one's going to derive equations for general relativity based on the rubber sheet analogy (or model - our physics class had a real model and we all had a chance to play with it). But it's certainly a great "a ha!" style of demonstration to solidify what is happening from dozens of equations and dry text.
And face it - modern physics is really damn hard to show people what is happening - either things are too big (relativity) or too small (quantum physics) that most people do not have any sort of grasp of it. At best, you have a model or an analogy. And never mind gravity is an extremely weak force to deal with.
So no, you aren't going to be mathematically correct. You are, however, going to get a lot of "I get it now!" reactions. Because in normal everyday life, gravity is not like what the theory says it is. We experience gravity like what Newton said it is. We don't see gravitational lensing or other such things
I say the rubber sheet model is more adept at getting the public to understand relativity than anything else.
Nvidia's just saying that because they lost the bid for all the consoles.
(It doesn't mean it's not true, though.)
Maybe, but unlikely - I think they deliberately spurned away consoles after what happened with the original Xbox and the PS3 - basically they end up being screwed badly by both Sony and Microsoft and they didn't want that happening again.
AMD though, needs the business (both Microsoft and Nintendo provided some support for the Wii and Xbox360).
4K is the horizontal resolution, not the number of pixels. Actually, it is 3840 pixels Ã-- 2160 for most "4K" TVs, or about 8.3 MegaPixels. Some models are much less than $3K. Here is one for $500.
4K Ultra HD is quad-1080P, i.e., 3840x2160. "4K" can also refer ot 4K Cinema, which is 4096x2160, where the 4K literally means 4Ki.
Though, sometimes it's also confused with the plain old 4000x2160 format, or 4K.
Of course, home electronics use 3840x2160 because it's just doubling 1080p in each dimension, making it easy to scale.
And until you have HDMI2.0, it's really 3840x2160 @ 30fps (same bandwidth as 1080p 3D @ 60fps) using HDMI 1.4 which doubles bandwidth of HDMI 1.3 which supports 1080p @ 60.
I work in the medical products field as a software developer. You would not believe the amount of red tape involved in making a piece of software that is used to advise treatment. Such software is classified by the FDA as equivalent risk to an implanted defibrillator!
Which is why the FDA has been cracking down on medical apps - there are established guidelines on the research involved. One of the first casualties were "color" apps that basically said "Run the app, shine on your acne and it'll go away in a week - the app magically emits the right wavelength to clear acne". Which is obviously BS, and why the FDA got rid of them - the FDA got started in the snake oil days and we see here the return of the same snake oil salesmen.
However, the FDA isn't a backwards leaning organization - they deal with the forefront of medical technology all the time and are open to apps that can improve one's health. They have guidelines on what they can do (basically what people are allowed to claim on TV and all that) and what research and safety is required.
This app is, primarily, prescription only. Your doctor has to write a Rx for it in order to use it. If that's the case, the FDA probably already has approved the app and any other ancillary things needed along with it, including user training and responsibilities. And maybe even the hardware the app runs on - it's not an iOS app you can get from the iTunes store or whatever (because everything, even if it's $1000, is available without a prescription). So most likely the FDA has put in certain restrictions, including software reliability guidelines which may mean even though it's an app, it's really an entire smartphone-app combination running controlled software.
Quantum computing would only give you a modest square root speed up on computing the hash functions. You could however break the elliptic curve signature algorithm and sign all the coins to yourself.
No, for bitcoin mining, what happens is you take the hash of the current blockchain, add a nonce (basically a random number, similar to a salt) to it, and hash that result. If the hash meets a certain requirement (for bitcoin, it's a number of zeroes that start the hash) then it's a hit and you get entered into the bitcoin lottery. The more hashes you can do, the more nonces you check and the more likely you'll find a matching hash.
With a quantum computer, you reverse the hash - given the hash requirements, you reverse it so you can find nonces quickly and submit them to the lottery. Basically you want the hash to be something, and you're given a fixed input plus a variable input. If you can reverse the hash, you can find the variable input quickly and submit it. Otherwise, you're stuck with, as everyone is doing, brute-forcing the variable input to get the hash you want.
BTC does not fill any niche. What is it that BTC allows me to do that I cannot do through the bank, using any currency of my choice?
Semi-anonymous donation.
Think of it now - this guy now has a way to basically fund his campaign without oversight. Sure, he can report all his BTC dealings on his public wallet, but he can always create another wallet for those "special interests" that want to bypass any election fundraising laws. And since BTC's blockchain only tells you which wallets were used, he can probably transfer the money to separate exchanges and no one is the wiser that $BIG_CORP just sent him $100K.
Of course, it could be used for good, but that makes assumptions that BTC doesn't guarantee.
OTOH, use US dollars and things have a way of revealing themselves.
We're lampooning it, in part, because it's so Mythbusters to control the car with belts and pulleys and by pushing the pedals when many modern cars could be electronically told to do that.
No, most cars cannot do it electronically.
The only things you can do electronically in a car is accellerate and change gears (in a auto or autostick). You can even "suggest" the windows and doors lock and unlock. But you have no control over brakes and steering, for obvious reasons. Sure you have ABS and traction control, but those all failsafe - the computer cannot prevent actuation of brakes or the turning of the wheel no matter what it does.
It's why you need a linear actuator for the brakes, and a servo for the wheel - you cannot control those things at all. Sometimes even the shifter may have an interlock to prevent the car from being commanded into gear while the shifter is in park.
And the door locks and window buttons, even electric, are controlled by the door switch - the computer can tell the locks to lock, but the switch overrides that suggestion. Just like if the computer tells the windows to close, the switch will override that and command them to open.
Car designers aren't stupid, and I'm sure the definition of roadworthiness long includes such requirements learned over the years.
I understand your dread of entering the U.S. (though you say you have only "read" about "horror stories" and not actually done it yourself), but this is a common misconception. The U.S. Constitution applies to every person in the country, even if they are there illegally, with some obvious exceptions, such as the right to vote.
True, except, at the border you're not by definition in the country. You're at the border - and to get IN the country requires crossing it. So even though you might be on land the US considers theirs, you're not officially in the country. You are technically in a "no-man's land" when you exited the country you left (at their border) and before you cross the border in the destination country.
It's how you get in situations where you're stuck at the airport - you can't leave because you haven't crossed the border, and you can't cross the border because you're lacking valid paperwork. It's downright impossible when your country self-implodes while you're in the no-man's land and thus no border guard recognizes your passport. Or you can be like Edward Snowden who had his US passport cancelled and thus can only enter countries as a refugee (or return to the US - despite having an invalid passport, he's still a US citizen. Of course, that's not exactly a good idea...).
And yes, until you prove yourself to the guard (whose job is to protect the country), you have no rights and no recourse. And because of the huge power granted to them, they are often gruff and can be power-tripping.
Of course, the game "Papers Please" is supposed to be fictional, but it's a fairly representative look at running a border.
OSX is based off BSD now, so there are plenty of command tools available to you. All your basic linux commands work in OSX as well as several additional useful OSX command tools that just don't exist elsewhere. I frequently run command line scripts to configure OSX and install numerous pieces of software on several Macs. You can also install Fink, or MacPorts, or Homebrew to install plenty of additional useful software. It's all there if you learn how to use OSX on the command line.
Actually, many of the OS X utilities are really frontends for the command line. Disk Utility requires the "diskutil" CLI tool to mount, unmount, create, format, partition, etc disks - including support for esoteric things like Fusion Drive can all be done via the command line.
And through things like AppleScript, many GUI apps are "scriptable" as well (OS X ships with ruby, perl and python that as script-enabled so those languages can control GUI apps). I think it's actually a rare instance where you are forced to use a GUI on OS X as there are many CLI ways to do it.
OS X may be a bad example of a GUI-first OS since it's practically impossible by default to not make a scriptable program - GUI or CLI. Even many GUI programs take command line arguments.
About the worst thing is that OS X CLI arguments are non-standard and verbose.
One problem is that the trains go through small towns with volunteer fire departments, not well schooled in handling a derailment and explosion.
More importantly, the towns through which these trains travel aren't told what's being shipped through them. Even after Lac Megantic the Canadian government is doing everything possible to allow rail companies to not provide prior details of dangerous cargo being shipped by rail.
Firstly, to be fair to the train companies - a lot of early towns were set up along rail lines, so it's not that they intentionally ran tracks through towns - the towns either petitioned for the line to run through their town (a station in the early days brought forth a pile of tourism and was pretty much the only way in and out short of multi-day horseback). Early North America was basically ruled by the rail companies - if you didn't appease the rail boss well enough, he could simply not build a track near your town.
Anyhow, back to the Harper Government (that's the official name). Well, Harper hails from Alberta, and no matter what it is, his heart is in Alberta (think Canadian version of Texas, with Harper as well, Bush Jr.). If the public knew what was being carried by rail, they'd petition to shut it down - Lac Megantique was probably the expected result. It could be any sort of dangerous goods and the end result is the same. It just happened that this one carried crude. But it could be chlorine gas, hydrogen sulfide (sour gas), whatever.
As such, Harper's a guy of "sell everything, - let's make money and companies make money". Beholden to the corporations assuming that when they make money, they make jobs (which is to a basic extent, true). However, no one asked if they produce good jobs (not really) or if they're just cheaping out so the CEO can pocket another yacht in bonuses.
Heck, Harper pretty much called every Canadian opposed to Keystone XL a traitor. (And to be honest, I would be highly surprised if Obama didn't approve it without some rather tasty kickbacks to the US - namely carbon neutrality with carbon credits purchased from the US).
We know that iphones kept location logs, for example. Apple claimed it was done in error... Perhaps a deliberate error by an NSA agent in their ranks, but we will probably never know.
It wasn't a location log. It was a cache. If you enable location services, your iDevice gets sent a list of local MAC addresses for WiFi and tower IDs. Apple sends you a list of MAC addresses and their locations so you can do WiFi-based geolocation (Apple owns at least one company doing this).
In fact, you can take a WiFi-only iPad or iPod touch, tether it to your phone, and then do Google Maps. You'll find the same data in the cache from WiFi. Now, how precise the log is depends on your WiFi density. If you're in the city, Apple may send you only a block wide of data because of the WiFi density. In the country, you'll probably see far less accurate "tracking".
Anyhow, it's easy for the NSA to get at all the phone data. Without Apple's permission.
For iOS 6 and below, you just hook it to a PC and snarf all the data - Ubuntu's had this since 12.04!
For iOS7, isn't it convenient that an iOS7 jailbreak just happened to come out? And who's to bet that the NSA doesn't have more jailbreaks at the ready? Perhaps that's how ev4ders7 got their jailbreak?
I'd put releasing the XBone with Kinect on a list. It'll be out of the box by April is my guess.
I don't think it's a bad plan at all - because developers know they can rely on the user to have a Kinect, even if it's unplugged. So they can assume stuff like voice recognition and even body motion because it's in the box.
If it's unplugged, well, the devs will simulate it some other way - even it requires going through a million menus to do what would've taken 2 seconds by voice.
Now, if Microsoft didn't put it in the box, you're looking at what's happening with Sony's Move - sure you save a tiny bit of money, but now you've just relegated it to niche status. Just a toy that some people may have, and this early in the game, pretty much just good for putting sex shows online on Twitch.
The end effect is "enhanced with Kinect" is probably standard with Xbone, while the PS4 gets some lame ass implementation of what Kinect does. After all, the PS4 camera lets you do face recognition login and a modicum of voice commands that were put in as an afterthought to compete.
Hell, Sony's wasted money on the PS4 controller by adding in the parts for the Move when most users won't have it - every controller has a (2D - only X-Y positioning) Move emitter, but not every PS4 has a camera. Sure RGB LEDs are cheap, but it's still an extra expense. Especially as it's 2D only - for 3D positioning you need a regular Move controller with the ball as the camera can't see depth with the controller's built-in Move. (And really, who puts in 720p cameras? Yes, the PS4 cameras are 720p stereo).
Sony probably removed the cameras at the last minute just to undercut Microsoft. Not necessarily a good or bad idea - the Xbox360 was around $400-500 at launch, the PS3 was way out there, and the Wii was $250. When the prices tightened down a couple of years alter, it was $200, $300 and $400 and the PS3 took off.
The price these days is not an issue - $200, $400, $500, it's not a huge range. Hell, a PS4 + Camera is only $40 cheaper.
No, Microsoft won't be taking it out of the box. Especially as the first round of new games since release would be out assuming Kinect.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem is, if you want to define a SteamBox as a console, the PC industry is done for.
Because the cheapest one is $500. And the CES announcements show them going to $1300. Tell me how many "cheaper games" you have to buy to justify the $800 premium over an Xbone? (Especially since well, both PSN and Xbox Live also run sales).
And how long are they going to last? I mean, the Xbone and PS4 are going to probably last at least 5 years (the past gen PS3 and Xbox360 are pushing 7 and 8 years). Will today's $500 SteamBox last 5 years? Or are PC developers going to say 2 years from now "Today's steambox is super cool, let's target it!" and leave everyone who bought a $500 SteamBox in the dust?
And nevermind the Tier 1 PC maker who integrates it all on a motherboard and releases it for $400, screwing over everyone who paid $500. If you're going to subject your console to wild price differentials and all that, there better be a good reason other than technical gobbledegook. Titan this, 386 that 6970 over there, foobarbaz. Sorry, people will see "SteamBox" and expect them to work alike. They're buying a console, not a PC.
If Valve plays this wrong, PC developers might need to support Intel 5000 graphics (Haswell) for the next 5+ years running at 1080p because those were the cheapest.
If Valve wants these as gaming PCs, they need to be put near the PCs side. Unfortunately, the way they're positioned now, they're competing against consoles. And outside the big three, the only console maker to have some success is... Apple (more inadvertently than anything). Even the heavily hyped Ouya is struggling.
Funny enough, I had it happen to me with British Telecom and apparently some university in Colorado.
But for both of them, I couldn't use the password reset link - each time I tried, it gave me "email address is not recognized" which when I look at the headers, no it's not. No + addressing or anything - I just copied and pasted the email address from the header.
One of the ironies is that BT is sending me personal details about their account - I know they have a moderate DSL link, a couple of phone lines, they are a business, etc., and I was even given their real mailing address! And after all the EU nonsense about privacy! They're just emailing all the details to me in the clear, to a US routed e-mail server! (My domain is hosted in the US).
The Colorado university one I didn't understand - they were sending me all sorts of notices and such, but I certainly couldn't log in or recover password. Oddly, I could unsubscribe just fine.
And my domain isn't the sort that I'd expect people would accidentally enter (being a .net to begin with and while only 4 characters, is still unrelated to any subject I could think of, so it's not like people would accidentally make a typo or something).
And those were two of the more notable ones.
All I know is, apparently a mining engineer and a business in the UK are probably wondering where their email is.
Unfortunately, I can't be bothered to do anything but mark it as spam.
No, the reason is that 4K monitors ran at 30Hz. Yes, last year's HDMI 1.4 4K TVs did so at 30Hz (30fps). Because that was the same bandwidth as 1080p60 3D (showing two 1080p frames 60 times a second is the same as one with double the dimensions and halving the framerate).
If you do dual controllers you can have 4K @ 60fps, which is probably somewhat more desirable. Depending on the video card, operating at 30fps can be a real pain because Windows oddly becomes less responsive.
Single controller 4K should be doable these days with HDMI 2.0 - but now you need new monitors and video cards.
Depends on the level of traceability desired. You want to know why a bolt for an aircraft is $5 each, versus probably the exact same bolt you can buy at Home Depot for $2/lb (or probably under 10 cents each)?
It's traceability. That aircraft bolt is serial numbered. You can take that serial number to the manufacturer, and they will tell you the batch of steel extrusion it came from. You can take that batch number, go to the forge, and look it up. That'll tell you where the steel came from - was it new steel? Recycled steel? If it's new steel, they can trace it to the mine that produced the iron ore, and probably that mine can even tell you where the iron ore came from. If it's recycled, they can tell you which facility supplied them the recycled parts, and you can probably take that to the original recycler and they can tell you what went into it. If not, they can still produce quality analysis and lab reports showing the composition of the steel when it was forged, on what date and all that stuff.
Fully traceable, and you can do that for any part. Oh yeah, you can also take that serial number for the bolt, and see where it came from - if it was a recycled bolt from something else. What aircraft it came from (type and all that), why it was removed, etc. (And yes, you do get counterfeit parts entering the system - usually because it's traced back to a few companies who do it and they admit it).
The problem is - what kind of traceability is the SEC wanting? Do they want the ability to take a computer, break it down to its parts, then go to the manufacturer with each serial number and trace it back to the raw minerals? Because that's aircraft like traceability.
Or do they just want a "we buy our parts from DigiKey, who promise us the parts are conflict-free"? Which is extremely lightweight and doable with existing systems - since they have the orders for parts so they can look up what parts were ordered from DigiKey and verify that the DigiKey catalog says they are conflict free. They can cross reference the orders with the actual DigiKey order and verify how DigiKey verifies that they're conflict free and see DigiKey's orders for that part, then go to the supplier and verify, and so on. So they're not tracing that every single part is definitely conflict free, but the parts were ordered on the belief they were conflict free.
The second level of verification is cheap - it costs nothing because the companies are already maintaining those records - they order conflict-free parts form a supplier, the supplier gives them supposedly conflict free parts, end of story. You can audit the supplier to see where they got them from and then the manufacturer.
At no point can they guarantee it - perhaps the manufacturer decided to cheat and mislabel them.
Of course, you know what? You can bet Apple will be among the first to rise to the challenge, again in a show of "we're better than all of you" since everyone else still hasn't even gotten to the laundry list that Apple gives (purely for marketing to Greenpeace - everyone else "greener" is really just talk, no action , resulting in Apple getting dinged despite them being "better").
It was also a payment facilitator. Silk Road was more like eBay+Paypal combined, with the exception that you MUST use the Silk Road to pay the seller.
The 27,000 BTC that the FBI seized were such in-transit money - it was escrow money that buyers sent to the Silk Road to pay the sellers in trust. (Of course, Silk Road took a percentage). They still haven't found the DPR stash, worth much more.
Technically, the buyers could appeal to the FBI for the money back, but since the FBI would need to know transaction details and records (which wallet, which destination, which transaction it was for - there's full record keeping in BTC, and Silk Road had to keep temporary in-flight records while the money was in escrow), well, they'd be released and re-seized under different laws.
Actually, that's just the image they want to project.
The real reason why companies have development centres in Canada is simple - it's a LOT easier to get work visas and such in Canada! And there's a bunch of times when particular people are hard to hire in the US, but a lot easier in Canada because of visas.
So as noble as companies like Cisco are to do R&D in Canada, it's really because Canada is a lot more "easygoing" on immigration. So that Chinese worker who was denied a work visa in the US? Well, Canada gave them one, so just set up a development centre in Canada and you're golden.
A lot of companies have development centres in Canada for this reason - many set up years or even decades ago. Doing it this year? Nothing special. Of course, I don't mind (I'm in Canada) as it means damn, our workplaces are full of diversity.
And no, it's often not the Canadian equivalent of H1Bs or anything - they're people who actually immigrate to Canada (it seems you get to celebrate someone getting their citizenship several times a year or so).
Not really, they only have what, $27M worth of it? Around 27,000 or so?
The Winklevoss twins (of Facebook fame) have made several declarations that they own approximately 10% of all BTC out there. Since there's only ever going to be 21M BTC, that means they have close to 2M BTC. Which at current value is close to $2B USD. Of course, they acquired this a long time ago (probably around $16 or less)...
They're like earthquakes - there are a lot of them, but they vary in intensity. Many are small, some are large.
The big problem is they are charged particles. When the charged particles enter the Earth magnetosphere, they distort it (moving charges, blah blah blah). Which changes the earth's magnetic field. And when you have a changing magnetic field, well, it induces current in wires, notably, nice long transmission lines we use to carry bulk power. Which trips all sorts of protective circuits because these can be quite dangerous current flows. See 1980s and Quebec Hydro, where such a CME took down the grid.
The other thing is, they're ionized particles, so when they hit surfaces, they can emit all sorts of radiation as well, which is how they can also damage satellites too.
They're fairly easy to detect (solar flares travel at the speed of light, we know 8 minutes later), but a CME is a cloud of charged energetic particles that can take hours to more than a week to arrive after said flare.
And when you're experimenting, I suppose you want to control variables - were the errornous readings caused by the CME or were they something else? It's hard to tell, and it's not like you can re-run the experiment again (too much $$$, can't set up same conditions) to see why.
And modern electronics is more vulnerable - the deep sub micron processes we use for ICs and such are far more vulnerable - transistors are using less power to switch so a bit of radiation doesn't have to be too powerful to flip a state. Or destroy it completely.
Apply 5V (or 12V, which is what old school CMOS 4xxx ICs could take easily) to your modern 1.2V CPU, and it'll pop.
Except... doctor-patient privilege. Medical records are private, and unless you give permission, even family is not allowed to know.
So no, that embarrassing night you went out with a hooker and got HIV, well, all anyone is allowed to know (i.e., your insurance company) is you got HIV. And unless you tell your doctor it's OK, even he's professionally not allowed to tell family how you got it.
The thing is, though, there's just a bunch of taboo subjects. Things people just don't talk about. Like erectile dysfunction - just try to get any man to admit their penis doesn't "work". Or how they got that particular rash. Or anything to deal with sex.
That's one reason why patients lie - societal norms keep them from telling people. And things that are "bad" like that guy's night out where you got plastered, or whatever, well, people don't like telling others about it (until revealed by Google Glass and their associated glassholes).
Hell, even answering the question "Are you a homosexual" can explain things. But most people take offense and will lie, despite privilege.
Of course, the other reason is, well, having the doctor judge you - despite privilege, admitting you smoke, drink too much, are fat, etc, well, generally attract disdain from the medical profession.
Perhaps the time will come when as an option, you have a choice of seeing a computer doctor - one who can show disdain, but is cold, calculating and clinical so non-judgemental. Eliza was an experiment that showed that humans would often tell a computer more than they would say, their doctor.
No, it's not the games that are killing steambox, it's the competition.
Steamboxes start at $500 and go on up - the initial list I saw, you can get ones that go to $1400+.
Well shit, you know what? Everyone who wants to buy one (i.e., not you and me, who can install SteamOS on their own PC) will head down to Best Buy and look at it. You can get a PS4. An Xbone. Or a Steambox. Best Buy will probably carry 4 or 5 of them, all with technical gobbledogook of nVidia this, Core i5 that, blah blah blah. And no, Best Buy will not carry one that costs more than $500 because people will just laugh and walk by it.
And so you have the consumer having to choose the "best" $500 box out of the 4 or 5 in front of them. What will make the choice for them? How it looks. Because they can't make the choice!
And never mind the whole "Good" "Better" "Ultimate" strategy - the only ones most consumers will see are "Good" because they're priced like the PS4 and Xbone.
And sure, maybe the first units will sell. But take it two years later, and "Good" no longer is adequate - they're going to see people with PS4s and Xbones playing games, while they're stuck with a new SteamBox purchase or run in "Crappy" mode.
End result - developers will bitch about PS4 and Xbone graphics holding them back, but also first-gen Steamboxes as well,if they want the platform to be viable because the consumer is not going to be buying a new one in a couple of years. And no, they're not going to spend $100 to put in a new video card either ($150 with Geek Squad!).
We saw it this time around - the PS3 and Xbox 360 holding PC graphics back. The Steambox is an obvious attempt to revitalizing PC gaming (most AAA titles are ported from consoles, and if you're lucky, they release same day) as well as giving developers freedom to use high end graphics again.
And nevermind when instead of Tier 3 PC manufacturers (i.e., OEM assemblers) you have Tier 1 (they make it all - they design their own motherboards, etc) integrating all but the video card on a single board, removing excess parts, and selling what was a $500 SteamBox for $400. Or slapping it all together so its not swappable on a single board for $350.
The steambox is trying to put choice into consoles, which is the whole reason consoles exist - you go to the store, you buy it, you play it for many years and they're all the same. When you have now a dozen manufacturers with a dozen different models, and probably a half dozen more cheaper ones coming out, suddenly it doesn't look so easy for the consumer anymore.
Remember what happened when Microsoft first announced the Xbone with the always on DRM?
How Sony crucified them over offline play, easy sharing, used games, etc?
And then go an announce the PS4 will never do that?
Well, Sony was right - the PS4 won't do it. They'll put games on their streaming service which do the same thing. Minus the ONE USEFUL feature that the Xbone initially offered - the ability to sell/transfer a game license to someone else! (I.e., used game sale - sure they allowed for the possibility of blocking it or from taking a small part of the transaction fee, but it was possible).
It looks like a backhanded way of doing what the Xbone was originally going to do, and to go around any promises that were made to turn the PS4 into the always-on DRM the Xbone originally had.
Hell, I wouldn't be surprised if PS+ started putting games on there as a way to encourage game sales - my PS4 only has the free PS+ games on it. Because I know Sony will put Knack on it for free sometime soon (I want to play it), so I can save myself $60 by waiting. Of course, if this service comes online between now and then, Sony could very easily make it an online only game.
To be honest, it's also why both Microsoft and Sony need to do well - because each keeps each other honest. When Microsoft decided to err with the DRM, Sony came out and corrected them. When Sony tried to sneak away from music, Microsoft announced they supported it causing Sony to announce a future fix a few days later.
Competition is keeping both honest, and it looks like sales are steady enough to do that in the near term (4M units for the PS4, 3M for the Xbone). Sadly, Nintendo looks to be the odd man out (4M units, but a year head start).
And if you know the status of everything, so can someone else hack into them (what, you think these things have security?) and get status as well. And by close examination of what goes on, figure out if it's a really someone at home, or not.
And that's just monitor-only. Once you get the ability to remotely lock and unlock stuff, well now, things got a lot more interesting. Along the lines of "did you change your deadbolt in the last 6 months? If not, your deadbolt is VULNERABLE! Buy a new one to get the latest software security updates".
And even if people don't steal things, they can still go and grief you - break a window, plug up the drains, turn on the water. Flip all your breakers, etc. Especially if you're in a cold climate - what good does remote monitoring do if they broke your windows, killed your heat, and turned on the taps so everything is now icy inside and destroyed.
The problem is, a lot (if not most) keygens are wrapped in ways that make it impossible to tell. After all, a wrapped keygen is a trojan, and it's so easy to do tons of things that no anti-malware can detect them call because it's so easy to do. All the trojan has to do is spawn a downloader process, then launch the real keygen, and you're none the wiser.
There's nothing any anti-malware can do about it - there's no way to tell if it's a clean keygen or a wrapped one. Heck, many of them are also packed EXEs just like the keygens themselves.
And yes, trojans are impossible to scan - your malware scanner might detect when the wrapped keygen actually downloads a known piece of malware, but that downloader will quietly run in the background until someone actually analyzes it.
The problem is the rubber sheet is a 2D surface. It can represent two dimensions. It can be two of space (as is normal), one space and one time, etc.
Real spacetime is a 4D entity - 3 (elongated) space, 1 time. The reason we use the rubber sheet analogy is because visualizing the distortions in spacetime (a 4D entity) is quite... difficult. Even visualizing a 3D representation is quite hard (pick your mix of space and time dimensions you want to show).
However, a 2D representation is quite easy to demonstrate and show to a class so they can visualize that happens. Sure, gravity is the biggest reason why the rubber sheet curves and what causes the marble to follow the curves, but it's a remarkably intuitive image of the warping of spacetime. (Then again, gravity is what causes the warping to begin with, and while we're using the earth to warp a rubber sheet because it's convenient...).
To be honest, it isn't a rigorous mathematical model, but it was never supposed to be. It's a practical demonstration on the weirdness of spacetime and gravity, illustrated on a 2D plane because we, despite being 4D entities have a hard time imagining it.
No one's going to derive equations for general relativity based on the rubber sheet analogy (or model - our physics class had a real model and we all had a chance to play with it). But it's certainly a great "a ha!" style of demonstration to solidify what is happening from dozens of equations and dry text.
And face it - modern physics is really damn hard to show people what is happening - either things are too big (relativity) or too small (quantum physics) that most people do not have any sort of grasp of it. At best, you have a model or an analogy. And never mind gravity is an extremely weak force to deal with.
So no, you aren't going to be mathematically correct. You are, however, going to get a lot of "I get it now!" reactions. Because in normal everyday life, gravity is not like what the theory says it is. We experience gravity like what Newton said it is. We don't see gravitational lensing or other such things
I say the rubber sheet model is more adept at getting the public to understand relativity than anything else.
Maybe, but unlikely - I think they deliberately spurned away consoles after what happened with the original Xbox and the PS3 - basically they end up being screwed badly by both Sony and Microsoft and they didn't want that happening again.
AMD though, needs the business (both Microsoft and Nintendo provided some support for the Wii and Xbox360).
4K Ultra HD is quad-1080P, i.e., 3840x2160.
"4K" can also refer ot 4K Cinema, which is 4096x2160, where the 4K literally means 4Ki.
Though, sometimes it's also confused with the plain old 4000x2160 format, or 4K.
Of course, home electronics use 3840x2160 because it's just doubling 1080p in each dimension, making it easy to scale.
And until you have HDMI2.0, it's really 3840x2160 @ 30fps (same bandwidth as 1080p 3D @ 60fps) using HDMI 1.4 which doubles bandwidth of HDMI 1.3 which supports 1080p @ 60.
HDMI 2.0 is to support full 4K (Cinema) @ 60fps.
Which is why the FDA has been cracking down on medical apps - there are established guidelines on the research involved. One of the first casualties were "color" apps that basically said "Run the app, shine on your acne and it'll go away in a week - the app magically emits the right wavelength to clear acne". Which is obviously BS, and why the FDA got rid of them - the FDA got started in the snake oil days and we see here the return of the same snake oil salesmen.
However, the FDA isn't a backwards leaning organization - they deal with the forefront of medical technology all the time and are open to apps that can improve one's health. They have guidelines on what they can do (basically what people are allowed to claim on TV and all that) and what research and safety is required.
This app is, primarily, prescription only. Your doctor has to write a Rx for it in order to use it. If that's the case, the FDA probably already has approved the app and any other ancillary things needed along with it, including user training and responsibilities. And maybe even the hardware the app runs on - it's not an iOS app you can get from the iTunes store or whatever (because everything, even if it's $1000, is available without a prescription). So most likely the FDA has put in certain restrictions, including software reliability guidelines which may mean even though it's an app, it's really an entire smartphone-app combination running controlled software.
No, for bitcoin mining, what happens is you take the hash of the current blockchain, add a nonce (basically a random number, similar to a salt) to it, and hash that result. If the hash meets a certain requirement (for bitcoin, it's a number of zeroes that start the hash) then it's a hit and you get entered into the bitcoin lottery. The more hashes you can do, the more nonces you check and the more likely you'll find a matching hash.
With a quantum computer, you reverse the hash - given the hash requirements, you reverse it so you can find nonces quickly and submit them to the lottery. Basically you want the hash to be something, and you're given a fixed input plus a variable input. If you can reverse the hash, you can find the variable input quickly and submit it. Otherwise, you're stuck with, as everyone is doing, brute-forcing the variable input to get the hash you want.
Semi-anonymous donation.
Think of it now - this guy now has a way to basically fund his campaign without oversight. Sure, he can report all his BTC dealings on his public wallet, but he can always create another wallet for those "special interests" that want to bypass any election fundraising laws. And since BTC's blockchain only tells you which wallets were used, he can probably transfer the money to separate exchanges and no one is the wiser that $BIG_CORP just sent him $100K.
Of course, it could be used for good, but that makes assumptions that BTC doesn't guarantee.
OTOH, use US dollars and things have a way of revealing themselves.
No, most cars cannot do it electronically.
The only things you can do electronically in a car is accellerate and change gears (in a auto or autostick). You can even "suggest" the windows and doors lock and unlock. But you have no control over brakes and steering, for obvious reasons. Sure you have ABS and traction control, but those all failsafe - the computer cannot prevent actuation of brakes or the turning of the wheel no matter what it does.
It's why you need a linear actuator for the brakes, and a servo for the wheel - you cannot control those things at all. Sometimes even the shifter may have an interlock to prevent the car from being commanded into gear while the shifter is in park.
And the door locks and window buttons, even electric, are controlled by the door switch - the computer can tell the locks to lock, but the switch overrides that suggestion. Just like if the computer tells the windows to close, the switch will override that and command them to open.
Car designers aren't stupid, and I'm sure the definition of roadworthiness long includes such requirements learned over the years.
True, except, at the border you're not by definition in the country. You're at the border - and to get IN the country requires crossing it. So even though you might be on land the US considers theirs, you're not officially in the country. You are technically in a "no-man's land" when you exited the country you left (at their border) and before you cross the border in the destination country.
It's how you get in situations where you're stuck at the airport - you can't leave because you haven't crossed the border, and you can't cross the border because you're lacking valid paperwork. It's downright impossible when your country self-implodes while you're in the no-man's land and thus no border guard recognizes your passport. Or you can be like Edward Snowden who had his US passport cancelled and thus can only enter countries as a refugee (or return to the US - despite having an invalid passport, he's still a US citizen. Of course, that's not exactly a good idea...).
And yes, until you prove yourself to the guard (whose job is to protect the country), you have no rights and no recourse. And because of the huge power granted to them, they are often gruff and can be power-tripping.
Of course, the game "Papers Please" is supposed to be fictional, but it's a fairly representative look at running a border.
Actually, many of the OS X utilities are really frontends for the command line. Disk Utility requires the "diskutil" CLI tool to mount, unmount, create, format, partition, etc disks - including support for esoteric things like Fusion Drive can all be done via the command line.
And through things like AppleScript, many GUI apps are "scriptable" as well (OS X ships with ruby, perl and python that as script-enabled so those languages can control GUI apps). I think it's actually a rare instance where you are forced to use a GUI on OS X as there are many CLI ways to do it.
OS X may be a bad example of a GUI-first OS since it's practically impossible by default to not make a scriptable program - GUI or CLI. Even many GUI programs take command line arguments.
About the worst thing is that OS X CLI arguments are non-standard and verbose.
Firstly, to be fair to the train companies - a lot of early towns were set up along rail lines, so it's not that they intentionally ran tracks through towns - the towns either petitioned for the line to run through their town (a station in the early days brought forth a pile of tourism and was pretty much the only way in and out short of multi-day horseback). Early North America was basically ruled by the rail companies - if you didn't appease the rail boss well enough, he could simply not build a track near your town.
Anyhow, back to the Harper Government (that's the official name). Well, Harper hails from Alberta, and no matter what it is, his heart is in Alberta (think Canadian version of Texas, with Harper as well, Bush Jr.). If the public knew what was being carried by rail, they'd petition to shut it down - Lac Megantique was probably the expected result. It could be any sort of dangerous goods and the end result is the same. It just happened that this one carried crude. But it could be chlorine gas, hydrogen sulfide (sour gas), whatever.
As such, Harper's a guy of "sell everything, - let's make money and companies make money". Beholden to the corporations assuming that when they make money, they make jobs (which is to a basic extent, true). However, no one asked if they produce good jobs (not really) or if they're just cheaping out so the CEO can pocket another yacht in bonuses.
Heck, Harper pretty much called every Canadian opposed to Keystone XL a traitor. (And to be honest, I would be highly surprised if Obama didn't approve it without some rather tasty kickbacks to the US - namely carbon neutrality with carbon credits purchased from the US).
It wasn't a location log. It was a cache. If you enable location services, your iDevice gets sent a list of local MAC addresses for WiFi and tower IDs. Apple sends you a list of MAC addresses and their locations so you can do WiFi-based geolocation (Apple owns at least one company doing this).
In fact, you can take a WiFi-only iPad or iPod touch, tether it to your phone, and then do Google Maps. You'll find the same data in the cache from WiFi. Now, how precise the log is depends on your WiFi density. If you're in the city, Apple may send you only a block wide of data because of the WiFi density. In the country, you'll probably see far less accurate "tracking".
Anyhow, it's easy for the NSA to get at all the phone data. Without Apple's permission.
For iOS 6 and below, you just hook it to a PC and snarf all the data - Ubuntu's had this since 12.04!
For iOS7, isn't it convenient that an iOS7 jailbreak just happened to come out? And who's to bet that the NSA doesn't have more jailbreaks at the ready? Perhaps that's how ev4ders7 got their jailbreak?
I don't think it's a bad plan at all - because developers know they can rely on the user to have a Kinect, even if it's unplugged. So they can assume stuff like voice recognition and even body motion because it's in the box.
If it's unplugged, well, the devs will simulate it some other way - even it requires going through a million menus to do what would've taken 2 seconds by voice.
Now, if Microsoft didn't put it in the box, you're looking at what's happening with Sony's Move - sure you save a tiny bit of money, but now you've just relegated it to niche status. Just a toy that some people may have, and this early in the game, pretty much just good for putting sex shows online on Twitch.
The end effect is "enhanced with Kinect" is probably standard with Xbone, while the PS4 gets some lame ass implementation of what Kinect does. After all, the PS4 camera lets you do face recognition login and a modicum of voice commands that were put in as an afterthought to compete.
Hell, Sony's wasted money on the PS4 controller by adding in the parts for the Move when most users won't have it - every controller has a (2D - only X-Y positioning) Move emitter, but not every PS4 has a camera. Sure RGB LEDs are cheap, but it's still an extra expense. Especially as it's 2D only - for 3D positioning you need a regular Move controller with the ball as the camera can't see depth with the controller's built-in Move. (And really, who puts in 720p cameras? Yes, the PS4 cameras are 720p stereo).
Sony probably removed the cameras at the last minute just to undercut Microsoft. Not necessarily a good or bad idea - the Xbox360 was around $400-500 at launch, the PS3 was way out there, and the Wii was $250. When the prices tightened down a couple of years alter, it was $200, $300 and $400 and the PS3 took off.
The price these days is not an issue - $200, $400, $500, it's not a huge range. Hell, a PS4 + Camera is only $40 cheaper.
No, Microsoft won't be taking it out of the box. Especially as the first round of new games since release would be out assuming Kinect.