Other issues aside with displays, you know Apple doesn't make their displays, right? The only thing they had to do with "retina" was the marketing term retina. Their displays are made by LG and Samsung. Apple doesn't do any LCD or OLED research, they just buy what the display makers can sell them.
I have bought some Dell R430 and R730 servers, which are latest generation (Haswell based Xeons, DDR4 RAM) and guess what their one and only video output format is? That's right, a VGA port. No DVI, no DP, just VGA. No surprise either: Go have a look at high end network'd KVMs. They are all VGA. It works, so it is staying around in that space (same deal as serial for that matter).
It is certainly a standard on the decline, digital transmission makes more sense particularly since our displays are digital these days, but dead? Not hardly. I'm sure it'll be around many years from now, just in more niche areas.
That's a bullshit term his PR people have come up with and for some damn reason the media, Slashdot included, seem to play along. Call him what he is: A corporate raider. He likes to get controlling shares of companies, load them with debt, sell of their assets, and leave them to rot.
Because if you'd graduated law school, or just taken a few classes for that matter, you'd know enough to be able to look in to relevant laws and see why your list is a crock that wouldn't hold up.
The reason I'm very anti-Apple is particularly our younger professors decide that they need to have apple computers, phones, and tablets to be hip. So they get them, against recommendations. Now never mind that these cost a lot more money than they'd spend on equivalent hardware but then the support issues start. Turns out that Mac don't just magically work, and they have problems with things (accessing the central storage is something Macs have been particularly problematic with) and they whine to us despite promising that they understand and will support things themselves.
Apple wants to pretend to be good for the enterprise, but their enterprise features are garbage. So people get them, want them to integrate, they don't, and then they cry about it.
If you want something that uses less power. It is as true today as ever that you can do more with less juice in an ASIC than in software. So sure, you throw a big CPU at something it can often do the trick. But maybe you don't want a big CPU and associated support hardware, maybe you have a reason to want something lower power. In that case, dedicated hardware comes in.
Also I think many people who dis hardware firewalls have never seen really difficult networks. It isn't so much the traffic that causes trouble, but the number and randomness of connections. I work on a university campus and we were getting firewalls back in the early days of them as dedicated appliances. On paper, our network as easy, we only had like an OC-3 (155mbps) to the Internet and you could get 1gbps firewalls no problem... ya those fell over the moment they were turned on. They could not handle the nature of our traffic. We ended up getting some of Cisco's very first hardware firewalls, and they worked well.
Law enforcement would actually love such technology, if it was reliable. Police have been killed when their weapon has been taken and used on them, they'd be very happy with something that stopped it. But, it does need to be reliable.
So I see no problem with the federal government investigating it. They should look in to new technologies that could make things safer. If they decide that ya, this is good, and start implementing it, then perhaps the rest of us should too, and probably would.
You have to have technology before you'll start to see more than a token amount of content. Few people are going to produce for 4k TVs when they are rare, which they still are these days. The technology has to get in place first, then you'll see more content.
It's been the same with anything: HDTV, color TV, DirectX 11, etc, etc. When a new tech comes out, there will be a few things to take advantage of it. Demos and the like. However it won't get widely supported until enough consumers have it to make it worth while. Right now, there aren't a lot of 4k TVs out there, and lower rez TVs are still widely sold. Even in houses that have 4k TVs, they often don't have a source that'll do 4k. So content is scarce. Check back in 5 years, I bet there's a good deal more.
It makes sense to me, and it isn't like the US would be the first or only free country with a national ID. Right now there's a strange situation where the government steadfastly insists that a passport is not for general ID, it is a travel document only, yet it is one of the best forms of ID since it is hard to forge and can identify you as a citizen or national.
To me, it would make sense to have a national ID that is a standard form, and available to all for no cost. This eliminates a lot of trouble with various other IDs. For that matter, it could be the kind of thing that is extensible too. Like instead of carrying a separate driver license, simply make that status an endorsement on the national ID.
Maybe there's something I'm missing as to why it is such a bad idea, but to me it seems like something worth doing.
How do you prevent criminals et al from using it? The problem with back doors is there really isn't any way I know of to make them secure. You can't make encryption where you don't need the key to decrypt it, yet it still is secure. The back door can be obfuscated or the like, but if someone finds it then it is game over.
So even if we decide we trust the government and they have good oversight and all that, it is still leaving things open to other parties. Good encryption keeps everyone else out, that is just how it works and how it has to work.
Numbers of guns aside (we are talking 300 million plus here) there is the issue of the Constitution. You have to remember that in the US the Constitution is above Federal law. All laws have to conform to it, it overrides, and thus the rights in the Bill of Rights section of it are rather sacred and protected.
Now if can be changed, but it is quite hard. It's only happened 17 times (the first 10 came in when the Constitution was first signed). First an amendment hast to be introduced. That requires either 2/3rds of both houses of Congress to vote for it. If either doesn't meet that super majority, it isn't introduced. Otherwise is requires 2/3rds of states to apply to congress to call a national convention for the purpose of amending the Constitution (this has never happened).
However that doesn't amend the Constitution, just introduce an amendment. Then it goes to the states themselves. 3/4ths of the states must then vote to ratify the amendment the Constitution. If enough states don't ratify, it doesn't become law.
So getting rid of the second amendment would requires a VERY large amount of Americans to support it to happen. And pure numbers don't matter, distribution does since it comes to the states. Even if 100% of the population in the populous states wants an amendment, if enough of the less populous don't want it, it can't happen.
Well, without getting rid of the second amendment, a gun ban can't happen. There have been numerous court rulings affirming that it is an individual right, as the other rights are, and thus the government can't just ban gun private ownership. They can regulate it, and they do, but they can't outright ban it without changing the Constitution which would be real, real, unlikely to happen.
Wouldn't be a real tragedy if people didn't immediately start trying to push their political agenda.
However if you want to play stupid politics, you might want to think a little about the whole situation since perhaps it doesn't support your narrative quite as much as you hope. Consider that the most recent two shootings occurred in California, which has some of the most restrictive gun laws in the US, and France, which has far more restrictive gun laws than anywhere in the US.
So my recommendation? How about STFU with the politics, at least for a bit until there is some more information out. Also when you do push politics, maybe do some thinking about what evidence you want to use, and actually state what you think should be done, rather than just make snarky statements.
That really is the big issue with a self build: If something goes wrong, you have to track it down and handle all the support. If you get a pre-built from a good vendor, they'll handle it all. Say what you want about Dell, but all you have to do is run their diags (baked in to the UEFI) and call them with the code, they'll send a dude with the parts needed.
So that should be the major thing you think about. If you don't want to do support, then buy it from a vendor that will provide you with support to the level you require. I tend to recommend Dell because their hardware is reasonable and they have support available everywhere. They subcontract it, but it all works well. We use it at work all the time.
If you are willing to do support yourself, then building it gets you precisely what you want. I build my system at home because I have very exacting requirements for what I'm after and nobody has that kind of thing for sale. Like I don't want a "good large power supply", I want a Seasonic Platinum 1000, nothing else.
Also you'll find that generally at the higher end of things you save money building a system. For more consumer/office range stuff it usually is a wash: They build the mass market systems around as cheap as you could afford to. However when you start talking higher end gaming stuff, you can pay a large premium for things.
As an example I just built a system for a good friend of mine. He wanted some very, very high end hardware and pretty specific requirements. Origin PC would get him what he wanted... for about $9,000. I put it together for around $6,000. The gamer stuff often commands a hefty premium.
And yet for all your misdirected Windows whining DirectX for Windows is the only area that AMD cards perform well. Their Linux drivers blow, as noted by other posts here, and that is because AMD can't write OpenGL drivers to save their life.
nVidia, on the other hand, has extremely fast and solid drivers for Linux.
And AMD can't handle OpenGL. I don't know why, I'm not sure what's so hard, I'm not sure if there's a monster that guards the OpenGL specs in the AMD office or something, but they have sucked at GL for over a decade, and show no signs of getting any better. They can't claim it is because of an API limitation either. For whatever you want to say about the mess that is OpenGL, nVidia makes their GL drivers dead even with their DX drivers. You can use either rendering path and can't tell the difference in features or speed.
That is also why I'm real skeptical that Vulkan is going to do anything for AMD. While they are heavily involved in the development, they are involved with OpenGL's development too (ATi was a voting member on the ARB and is a promoter with Khronos Group). Given that Vulkan is heavily GL based, originally being named glNext, I worry that AMD will suck at performance with it as well.
Not the driver, that's out, but that they are going to change how they do drivers. They've said that numerous times before, and always the situation is the same. They are very slow at getting actual release drivers out (they are forever beta versions) and their OpenGL performance and support is garbage (to the point that HFSS would fail to run on systems with AMD cards).
So AMD: Less talk, more good drivers. I want to support you, I really do, but I've been burned too many times.
The problem PFSense has as compared to consumer routers is that running on normal Intel CPUs it needs more CPU power (and thus cost) to be able to forward a given amount of traffic. Plus all the NICs and such are separate silicon. Boradcom makes little all-in-one chips that have a couple of ARM cores that have acceleration for routing and so on. Also they have things like an ethernet switch and ethernet PHYs on the chip so they needn't be added. Have a look at a BCM4709A for an example that is popular in routers.
PFSense is good but it is not the most economical thing if you are talking features matching a consumer router, meaning gig routing, multiple ports, and wifi, you can have your costs go up a fair bit. Particularly if you also then want it to be fairly small and low power. If you hop over to PFSense's site it would cost about $575 for a SG-2440 with WiFi which would give features roughly on par with a consumer router.
While I'd much rather have that over a consumer router, a consumer router is in fact what I have because I didn't want to spend a ton of money for a home router.
If this is for the kids, then they need to make the choice. Mostly because online play tends to only work in console. So if all their friends have an Xbox one and they have a PS4, then they can't play games together.
If you want any kind of technical considerations or the like the PS4 is faster than the Xbone because of details with hardware design so it will end up rendering things at a higher resolution and so on. Also the controllers feel very different in the hands, and some people have a strong preference. I like the Xbone controllers much better and they are what I use with my PC (I have a PS4 controller as well).
Really though what matters is choosing the one that has the games you want, and that plays with the people you want to play with. The rest is secondary.
Another person who doesn't understand the first amendment. The first amendment says that the government can't mess with your free expression. They can't put you in jail because you say something they don't like, they can't shut down a news paper for reporting on things they don't want, and so on. It does NOT say that people have to listen to whatever you say, like it, and not respond in any way.
This guy didn't have his rights violated at all: He said something extremely stupid, and people then used their first amendment rights to express that he's a jackass. His political party decided that because he'd pissed off lots of voters, they weren't interested in supporting them. They aren't required to support anyone, the choose the candidates they like. He realized he'd fucked up, and had no chance of wining, and so withdrew.
Nothing improper here. You seem to think that the first amendment should mean speech without consequence. Of course that doesn't work without infringing on the rights of others. If you say something I don't like, I have to be free to say I don't like you for it, or my freedom of speech is being infringed upon. I have to be free to refuse to talk to you, do business with you, etc or my freedom of association is being infringed upon.
Ultrasonic response is not something most devices are good at. We, unsurprisingly, tend to design your sound systems around what we can hear. Particularly when you are talking cheaper equipment the high frequency response of speakers and microphones is often not very impressive. There's also the issue that the digital audio compression we use for things, like TV broadcasts, deemphasizes high frequencies.
So for this to work they need:
1) A TV broadcast with sufficient audio bitrate to get their high frequency signal encoded (the AC-3 streams usually used in ATSC broadcasts can be any bitrate from 64kbps to 448kbps).
2) Encoded in such a way by the broadcaster that the high frequencies are preserved to a sufficient amount that their signal isn't distorted.
3) Reproduced by speakers good enough to produce their signal, but to do it at a sufficient level to be picked up (speakers roll off at more extreme frequencies).
4) Picked up by a microphone with sufficient range to be able to receive such a signal and isn't being occluded too much be being in a pocket or something.
5) Processed by a program running on the device, that has control of the microphone at the time the signal is playing.
Ya... While that isn't impossible, that is not likely to work any real amount of time. To have any good chance of working you'd probably have to push the signal down in to the audible range, which would of course piss people off to hear spurious high frequency noise. Likewise for it to be of any use the user would need to have an app on their device that is running. The mic doesn't magically record everything that comes in and store it for anything to access. A program has to be running and take control of the microphone to be able to get any input from it.
This sounds like an advertiser pipe dream, not something that has been tried with real technology in realistic settings.
People seem to think that ultrasonic communication is some kind of magic. It isn't. I mean it can be done, no question, you can encode information in sound, and you can do it in sound frequencies above human hearing. However that doesn't mean you can do it with any arbitrary device, or under arbitrary conditions.
Intel CPUs fully support 16-bit mode still. Look it up. What they don't support is going to VM86 while in Long Mode which leads to the old WoW system not working for 16-bit support.
There is just no need to sandbox 32-bit support, since it works great how it is. If you are interested, go and read about how WoW64 works and how Compatibility Mode inside Long Mode (on the CPUs) works. It allows for 32-bit software to execute in a 64-bit system with no fuss, and it is something people highly value.
Also again, do more research. You are jerking hard at the knee: Hyper-V -IS- included with Windows. Comes with every copy of pro, you just turn it on. Further if you think something like XP mode is a good solution you are kidding yourself. Now you have a virtual OS which doesn't get updated because it is no longer supported and is an easy vector for attacks. That copy of XP in XP mode is a full OS, and thus has the attack profile of any XP system out there.
Seriously, you really, really need to go and do some research on this topic if you care about it as much as you seem to. It isn't a simple situation of "just virtualize it" nor is a 32-bit compatibility layer the massive problem you make it out to be. You have a bunch of bits and pieces of facts, but a lot of misinformation filling it in.
If you want a platform that breaks older shit, well then go ahead and find one. However many of us would like our software to keep working. WoW64 has been a great success because 32-bit apps run seamlessly and very fast. So you can just use whatever software you want. This has made widespread 64-bit adoption possible. If suddenly 80+% of your programs stop working because there's no compatibility layer, people just won't want to use it. Many, many programs these days are still 32-bit. You may not like that or agree with the choice, but it is what it is. I want to be able to run my software, I don't care about ideological purity.
Also you might want to do your research a bit better, VirtualPC -IS- back. It's called Hyper-V now and it is MS's all encompassing virtualization solution. You can have it on the desktop all the way up to big clusters of servers.
Slashdot Mirror
Other issues aside with displays, you know Apple doesn't make their displays, right? The only thing they had to do with "retina" was the marketing term retina. Their displays are made by LG and Samsung. Apple doesn't do any LCD or OLED research, they just buy what the display makers can sell them.
I have bought some Dell R430 and R730 servers, which are latest generation (Haswell based Xeons, DDR4 RAM) and guess what their one and only video output format is? That's right, a VGA port. No DVI, no DP, just VGA. No surprise either: Go have a look at high end network'd KVMs. They are all VGA. It works, so it is staying around in that space (same deal as serial for that matter).
It is certainly a standard on the decline, digital transmission makes more sense particularly since our displays are digital these days, but dead? Not hardly. I'm sure it'll be around many years from now, just in more niche areas.
That's a bullshit term his PR people have come up with and for some damn reason the media, Slashdot included, seem to play along. Call him what he is: A corporate raider. He likes to get controlling shares of companies, load them with debt, sell of their assets, and leave them to rot.
Because if you'd graduated law school, or just taken a few classes for that matter, you'd know enough to be able to look in to relevant laws and see why your list is a crock that wouldn't hold up.
The reason I'm very anti-Apple is particularly our younger professors decide that they need to have apple computers, phones, and tablets to be hip. So they get them, against recommendations. Now never mind that these cost a lot more money than they'd spend on equivalent hardware but then the support issues start. Turns out that Mac don't just magically work, and they have problems with things (accessing the central storage is something Macs have been particularly problematic with) and they whine to us despite promising that they understand and will support things themselves.
Apple wants to pretend to be good for the enterprise, but their enterprise features are garbage. So people get them, want them to integrate, they don't, and then they cry about it.
But that post exceeds the USDA recommended daily dosage for Batshit Crazy.
If you want something that uses less power. It is as true today as ever that you can do more with less juice in an ASIC than in software. So sure, you throw a big CPU at something it can often do the trick. But maybe you don't want a big CPU and associated support hardware, maybe you have a reason to want something lower power. In that case, dedicated hardware comes in.
Also I think many people who dis hardware firewalls have never seen really difficult networks. It isn't so much the traffic that causes trouble, but the number and randomness of connections. I work on a university campus and we were getting firewalls back in the early days of them as dedicated appliances. On paper, our network as easy, we only had like an OC-3 (155mbps) to the Internet and you could get 1gbps firewalls no problem... ya those fell over the moment they were turned on. They could not handle the nature of our traffic. We ended up getting some of Cisco's very first hardware firewalls, and they worked well.
Law enforcement would actually love such technology, if it was reliable. Police have been killed when their weapon has been taken and used on them, they'd be very happy with something that stopped it. But, it does need to be reliable.
So I see no problem with the federal government investigating it. They should look in to new technologies that could make things safer. If they decide that ya, this is good, and start implementing it, then perhaps the rest of us should too, and probably would.
You have to have technology before you'll start to see more than a token amount of content. Few people are going to produce for 4k TVs when they are rare, which they still are these days. The technology has to get in place first, then you'll see more content.
It's been the same with anything: HDTV, color TV, DirectX 11, etc, etc. When a new tech comes out, there will be a few things to take advantage of it. Demos and the like. However it won't get widely supported until enough consumers have it to make it worth while. Right now, there aren't a lot of 4k TVs out there, and lower rez TVs are still widely sold. Even in houses that have 4k TVs, they often don't have a source that'll do 4k. So content is scarce. Check back in 5 years, I bet there's a good deal more.
It makes sense to me, and it isn't like the US would be the first or only free country with a national ID. Right now there's a strange situation where the government steadfastly insists that a passport is not for general ID, it is a travel document only, yet it is one of the best forms of ID since it is hard to forge and can identify you as a citizen or national.
To me, it would make sense to have a national ID that is a standard form, and available to all for no cost. This eliminates a lot of trouble with various other IDs. For that matter, it could be the kind of thing that is extensible too. Like instead of carrying a separate driver license, simply make that status an endorsement on the national ID.
Maybe there's something I'm missing as to why it is such a bad idea, but to me it seems like something worth doing.
We don't really need to be at war with another nation, thanks :P
How do you prevent criminals et al from using it? The problem with back doors is there really isn't any way I know of to make them secure. You can't make encryption where you don't need the key to decrypt it, yet it still is secure. The back door can be obfuscated or the like, but if someone finds it then it is game over.
So even if we decide we trust the government and they have good oversight and all that, it is still leaving things open to other parties. Good encryption keeps everyone else out, that is just how it works and how it has to work.
Numbers of guns aside (we are talking 300 million plus here) there is the issue of the Constitution. You have to remember that in the US the Constitution is above Federal law. All laws have to conform to it, it overrides, and thus the rights in the Bill of Rights section of it are rather sacred and protected.
Now if can be changed, but it is quite hard. It's only happened 17 times (the first 10 came in when the Constitution was first signed). First an amendment hast to be introduced. That requires either 2/3rds of both houses of Congress to vote for it. If either doesn't meet that super majority, it isn't introduced. Otherwise is requires 2/3rds of states to apply to congress to call a national convention for the purpose of amending the Constitution (this has never happened).
However that doesn't amend the Constitution, just introduce an amendment. Then it goes to the states themselves. 3/4ths of the states must then vote to ratify the amendment the Constitution. If enough states don't ratify, it doesn't become law.
So getting rid of the second amendment would requires a VERY large amount of Americans to support it to happen. And pure numbers don't matter, distribution does since it comes to the states. Even if 100% of the population in the populous states wants an amendment, if enough of the less populous don't want it, it can't happen.
Well, without getting rid of the second amendment, a gun ban can't happen. There have been numerous court rulings affirming that it is an individual right, as the other rights are, and thus the government can't just ban gun private ownership. They can regulate it, and they do, but they can't outright ban it without changing the Constitution which would be real, real, unlikely to happen.
Wouldn't be a real tragedy if people didn't immediately start trying to push their political agenda.
However if you want to play stupid politics, you might want to think a little about the whole situation since perhaps it doesn't support your narrative quite as much as you hope. Consider that the most recent two shootings occurred in California, which has some of the most restrictive gun laws in the US, and France, which has far more restrictive gun laws than anywhere in the US.
So my recommendation? How about STFU with the politics, at least for a bit until there is some more information out. Also when you do push politics, maybe do some thinking about what evidence you want to use, and actually state what you think should be done, rather than just make snarky statements.
That really is the big issue with a self build: If something goes wrong, you have to track it down and handle all the support. If you get a pre-built from a good vendor, they'll handle it all. Say what you want about Dell, but all you have to do is run their diags (baked in to the UEFI) and call them with the code, they'll send a dude with the parts needed.
So that should be the major thing you think about. If you don't want to do support, then buy it from a vendor that will provide you with support to the level you require. I tend to recommend Dell because their hardware is reasonable and they have support available everywhere. They subcontract it, but it all works well. We use it at work all the time.
If you are willing to do support yourself, then building it gets you precisely what you want. I build my system at home because I have very exacting requirements for what I'm after and nobody has that kind of thing for sale. Like I don't want a "good large power supply", I want a Seasonic Platinum 1000, nothing else.
Also you'll find that generally at the higher end of things you save money building a system. For more consumer/office range stuff it usually is a wash: They build the mass market systems around as cheap as you could afford to. However when you start talking higher end gaming stuff, you can pay a large premium for things.
As an example I just built a system for a good friend of mine. He wanted some very, very high end hardware and pretty specific requirements. Origin PC would get him what he wanted... for about $9,000. I put it together for around $6,000. The gamer stuff often commands a hefty premium.
"They are acting liberal but not liberal ENOUGH! They don't subscribe to precisely my kind of politics, so I need to hate on what they do."
People like the author piss me off. They aren't interested in any actual good, they are just interested in their agenda being pushed.
And yet for all your misdirected Windows whining DirectX for Windows is the only area that AMD cards perform well. Their Linux drivers blow, as noted by other posts here, and that is because AMD can't write OpenGL drivers to save their life.
nVidia, on the other hand, has extremely fast and solid drivers for Linux.
And AMD can't handle OpenGL. I don't know why, I'm not sure what's so hard, I'm not sure if there's a monster that guards the OpenGL specs in the AMD office or something, but they have sucked at GL for over a decade, and show no signs of getting any better. They can't claim it is because of an API limitation either. For whatever you want to say about the mess that is OpenGL, nVidia makes their GL drivers dead even with their DX drivers. You can use either rendering path and can't tell the difference in features or speed.
That is also why I'm real skeptical that Vulkan is going to do anything for AMD. While they are heavily involved in the development, they are involved with OpenGL's development too (ATi was a voting member on the ARB and is a promoter with Khronos Group). Given that Vulkan is heavily GL based, originally being named glNext, I worry that AMD will suck at performance with it as well.
Not the driver, that's out, but that they are going to change how they do drivers. They've said that numerous times before, and always the situation is the same. They are very slow at getting actual release drivers out (they are forever beta versions) and their OpenGL performance and support is garbage (to the point that HFSS would fail to run on systems with AMD cards).
So AMD: Less talk, more good drivers. I want to support you, I really do, but I've been burned too many times.
The problem PFSense has as compared to consumer routers is that running on normal Intel CPUs it needs more CPU power (and thus cost) to be able to forward a given amount of traffic. Plus all the NICs and such are separate silicon. Boradcom makes little all-in-one chips that have a couple of ARM cores that have acceleration for routing and so on. Also they have things like an ethernet switch and ethernet PHYs on the chip so they needn't be added. Have a look at a BCM4709A for an example that is popular in routers.
PFSense is good but it is not the most economical thing if you are talking features matching a consumer router, meaning gig routing, multiple ports, and wifi, you can have your costs go up a fair bit. Particularly if you also then want it to be fairly small and low power. If you hop over to PFSense's site it would cost about $575 for a SG-2440 with WiFi which would give features roughly on par with a consumer router.
While I'd much rather have that over a consumer router, a consumer router is in fact what I have because I didn't want to spend a ton of money for a home router.
If this is for the kids, then they need to make the choice. Mostly because online play tends to only work in console. So if all their friends have an Xbox one and they have a PS4, then they can't play games together.
If you want any kind of technical considerations or the like the PS4 is faster than the Xbone because of details with hardware design so it will end up rendering things at a higher resolution and so on. Also the controllers feel very different in the hands, and some people have a strong preference. I like the Xbone controllers much better and they are what I use with my PC (I have a PS4 controller as well).
Really though what matters is choosing the one that has the games you want, and that plays with the people you want to play with. The rest is secondary.
Another person who doesn't understand the first amendment. The first amendment says that the government can't mess with your free expression. They can't put you in jail because you say something they don't like, they can't shut down a news paper for reporting on things they don't want, and so on. It does NOT say that people have to listen to whatever you say, like it, and not respond in any way.
This guy didn't have his rights violated at all: He said something extremely stupid, and people then used their first amendment rights to express that he's a jackass. His political party decided that because he'd pissed off lots of voters, they weren't interested in supporting them. They aren't required to support anyone, the choose the candidates they like. He realized he'd fucked up, and had no chance of wining, and so withdrew.
Nothing improper here. You seem to think that the first amendment should mean speech without consequence. Of course that doesn't work without infringing on the rights of others. If you say something I don't like, I have to be free to say I don't like you for it, or my freedom of speech is being infringed upon. I have to be free to refuse to talk to you, do business with you, etc or my freedom of association is being infringed upon.
Ultrasonic response is not something most devices are good at. We, unsurprisingly, tend to design your sound systems around what we can hear. Particularly when you are talking cheaper equipment the high frequency response of speakers and microphones is often not very impressive. There's also the issue that the digital audio compression we use for things, like TV broadcasts, deemphasizes high frequencies.
So for this to work they need:
1) A TV broadcast with sufficient audio bitrate to get their high frequency signal encoded (the AC-3 streams usually used in ATSC broadcasts can be any bitrate from 64kbps to 448kbps).
2) Encoded in such a way by the broadcaster that the high frequencies are preserved to a sufficient amount that their signal isn't distorted.
3) Reproduced by speakers good enough to produce their signal, but to do it at a sufficient level to be picked up (speakers roll off at more extreme frequencies).
4) Picked up by a microphone with sufficient range to be able to receive such a signal and isn't being occluded too much be being in a pocket or something.
5) Processed by a program running on the device, that has control of the microphone at the time the signal is playing.
Ya... While that isn't impossible, that is not likely to work any real amount of time. To have any good chance of working you'd probably have to push the signal down in to the audible range, which would of course piss people off to hear spurious high frequency noise. Likewise for it to be of any use the user would need to have an app on their device that is running. The mic doesn't magically record everything that comes in and store it for anything to access. A program has to be running and take control of the microphone to be able to get any input from it.
This sounds like an advertiser pipe dream, not something that has been tried with real technology in realistic settings.
People seem to think that ultrasonic communication is some kind of magic. It isn't. I mean it can be done, no question, you can encode information in sound, and you can do it in sound frequencies above human hearing. However that doesn't mean you can do it with any arbitrary device, or under arbitrary conditions.
Intel CPUs fully support 16-bit mode still. Look it up. What they don't support is going to VM86 while in Long Mode which leads to the old WoW system not working for 16-bit support.
There is just no need to sandbox 32-bit support, since it works great how it is. If you are interested, go and read about how WoW64 works and how Compatibility Mode inside Long Mode (on the CPUs) works. It allows for 32-bit software to execute in a 64-bit system with no fuss, and it is something people highly value.
Also again, do more research. You are jerking hard at the knee: Hyper-V -IS- included with Windows. Comes with every copy of pro, you just turn it on. Further if you think something like XP mode is a good solution you are kidding yourself. Now you have a virtual OS which doesn't get updated because it is no longer supported and is an easy vector for attacks. That copy of XP in XP mode is a full OS, and thus has the attack profile of any XP system out there.
Seriously, you really, really need to go and do some research on this topic if you care about it as much as you seem to. It isn't a simple situation of "just virtualize it" nor is a 32-bit compatibility layer the massive problem you make it out to be. You have a bunch of bits and pieces of facts, but a lot of misinformation filling it in.
If you want a platform that breaks older shit, well then go ahead and find one. However many of us would like our software to keep working. WoW64 has been a great success because 32-bit apps run seamlessly and very fast. So you can just use whatever software you want. This has made widespread 64-bit adoption possible. If suddenly 80+% of your programs stop working because there's no compatibility layer, people just won't want to use it. Many, many programs these days are still 32-bit. You may not like that or agree with the choice, but it is what it is. I want to be able to run my software, I don't care about ideological purity.
Also you might want to do your research a bit better, VirtualPC -IS- back. It's called Hyper-V now and it is MS's all encompassing virtualization solution. You can have it on the desktop all the way up to big clusters of servers.