Strike fear in the heart of infidels?
Help erode the freedoms that citizens in most Western countries enjoy? (especially those freedoms that enable lifestyles hated so much by Islamic State supporters).
Revenge for whatever wrongs they think were done to them? (regardless of justified or not).
As a show of force? Letting everybody know they're still here, and capable of carrying out coordinated attacks abroad.
Just to name a few - surely there's more. In the end they will not accomplish their goals. First and foremost because Islamic State seems incapable of leaving peace-loving 'neighbours' alone. Action = reaction, a law of nature. If they'd just pick some limited area to call theirs, focus on primarily peaceful (r)evolution, and leave their neighbours in peace, they might have a chance at getting just that. But if they want to conquer the world through violence, and stop at nothing in the process... well then: nope, not gonna happen.
Second, because declared enemies of Islamic State aren't going to give up their lifestyles, countries, democracies etc NO MATTER WHAT. As a typical Westerner, personally I could care less what they do in Syria, Irak or neighbouring countries. But any Islamic State fighter is welcome to try and pry my freedoms from my dead fingers in a fight on my turf. Likewise, when their actions cause millions of refugees to "invade" our countries, how could they possibly expect us to not care? Again: action = reaction.
Lastly, because no matter how many crazies are out there, they are vastly outnumbered by regular / reasonable / peace-loving people. And quite a few of those have guns too. And planes. And bombs. And an intelligence apparatus. It's like a car picking a fight with a freight train... yes it'll be ugly, but the outcome is certain: a car cannot possibly win that fight.
What does killing people randomly accomplish?
In the context of these Paris attacks, you may want to re-think in how far victims were chosen "randomly". Not to suggest in any way that victims were known or specially selected. But hey if you start shooting on a busy Paris street, you're pretty likely to hit French people, right?
Depending on height of reward, that would either achieve nothing, or skew results towards low-income households. Since those would be more likely to take the money (vs. richer people who'd say "f** that, I've got more important things to do").
Once your country has been up and running for 200 years, there shouldn't be that many policies left to make.
Riiiiight.. because once a policy has been set, or a decision has been made, everything else stays the same?
NOT... Change is the only constant. That also goes for countries, populations, governments, and the (political / economic /...) environment they operate in. So it's good to be able to base today's decisions on today's facts & numbers (and future trends in those). Not to mention that since governments are always running behind on the facts, many rules are due for an overhaul anyway.
... that isn't just a cable, but includes electronics (even if it's just a resistor). Never liked that stuff anyway, poor choice of standards imho.
But when talking about cheap, we (as consumers) kind of get what we pay for. Most consumers look for the cheapest they can find, sellers respond to that by buying from manufacturers that can make products the cheapest, and yes in that process, often some corners are cut. Surprise surprise.
Biggest problem there isn't that cheap crap on the market, after all: buyers can choose. But sometimes that cheap crap is so ubiquitous, that manufacturers who make better stuff get squeezed out of the market. Such that after a while, it becomes almost impossible to find better product even if you're willing to pay for it. That's apart from the problem of determining what's crap and what isn't - sometimes there's no relation with price at all.
Those end-users that are 'lucky' enough to actually receive updates once in a while.
That is THE problem with Android right now imho: leaving updates to the OS to 3rd parties that are just interested in selling a phone or call/SMS/data package, is a totally broken model. Those 3rd parties should be required to provide working drivers for the hardware in their phone, in source form, and whoever maintains the OS (Google I suppose, or maybe some industry co-operation) should take it from there. Including the distribution of updates.
Those 3rd parties have too big a tendency to sell the phone & walk away. That is easy to foresee, and has been proven time and time again. So you simply CAN NOT rely on phone makers or providers to supply updates. Period. Trying to fix the problem when it's too late, doesn't help much: even if Google changes Android update model to how it should be, that still leaves hundreds of millions of phones out there which will never ever see an update again, but still be used for a long time to come.
Even if assuming that's the case: okay, so what? Things that are considered 'obsolete' are used in many places, every day, doing their thing. Often better than if done by a modern 'equivalent'.
From what I've read, MINIX has some unique features that mainstream OS'es don't have. For that reason alone there's a place for it. And it's useful as a way to learn the inner workings of an OS. Not as big and complex as an OS that supports everything under the sun.
Still not good enough hey? How about as a research vehicle? To try some new concepts that haven't been tried elsewhere. Do things that have been done elsewhere just a little different, and see how that works. Or just for the fun of it.
Especially us/. users should applaud and appreciate projects like this. There used to be a time when it seemed as if every company were working on some OS or programming language of their own. When hobbyists where beating bare metal of their PC's in assembly, even up to a GUI or 3D games. These days... not so much. Most software news these days is new releases of existing software. New versions of existing operating systems. Some new way to make existing software X work with existing software Y. Projects like MINIX that are still developed (even if slowly) are few and far between.
Last but not least: if you're not interested: fine, that's OKAY. But no reason to mock an interesting project simply because it's not your cup of tea.
This is plain and simply the gubberment desperately trying to keep all windows of the Panopticon open. Clueless old 19th century minds trying to legislate against the future and maintain their failed baboon style pyramid hierarchy.
Indeed, this smells like government either not understanding technology and where it's moving, and/or conspiring with spy agencies to get (keep?) their fingers in everything - including where they shouldn't be.
Unfortunately for them, there is no middle ground here. If the plebs can use general-purpose computers, there will be ways to get strong encryption software on it. If it's agreed you should be able to have a strongly secured connection between you and your bank (or your webmail, or your doctor, or a business partner, etc, etc, etc), then you can have such a connection between you and say, some 3rd party outside the country. If there even were a way to 'allow what goes through the pipes' (other than a North Korea-like totalitarian regime), only allowing weak encryption would make a lot of present-day applications impossible, to the point where businesses would be forced to set up shop elsewhere. Of course we all know that even a government with a half a brain cell wouldn't let that happen.
Which simply leaves the other option: strong encryption in the hands of the public, possibly outside of the reach of government, law enforcement or spy agencies. Not to mention that if not allowed, technology together with the public will find ways around that.
Which would force those parties to either accept a more reasonable approach, attack encryption-using criminals through the legal system, social engineering and such, or attack implementations and endpoints of encryption use. Oh wait.. wasn't that the easiest method anyway? lol:-))
If you didn't have the memory of a goldfish you would have noticed that only a few of the many battery improvements written about ten years ago have made it to market at all.
There, FTFY.
The road from lab to product is long and full of speed bumps (or rather: unexpected craters in the road). If you look at actually available products, battery tech is a steadily improving but SLOW moving market. A good analogy is open source software: on a regular basis there's important releases (that actually bring something new to the table), and the occasional surprise. But overall, it's a very gradually evolving ecosystem.
Care to explain how? If you mean by hacking a driver such that it produces more fps, then (by that logic) simply plugging in a faster GPU would qualify as cheating too. Note that the 'faster-GPU-cheat' is considered perfectly acceptable for online gaming, only exception being pro gaming tournaments where I'd expect all participants to have same-configured machines.
In case you were thinking about see-through-wall hacks, mods that help with aiming etc: those things are in game engines not graphics drivers.
What I don't understand is why AMD bothers to keep Catalyst around, when a) they've already shown to be supportive towards open source, b) Catalyst drivers have always been considered crap compared vs. their Nvidia counterpart (by most gamers anyway), and c) the open drivers have made leaps & bounds of progress in the last few years.
Supporting both the open and closed source drivers will surely take more resources than focussing the effort on one of them. And I kind of doubt that AMD has much resources to spare for this kind of thing. The open drivers have caught up to Catalyst quite a bit lately, why not work towards replacing Catalyst with it? That would make everybody on AMD side of the fence happy I think (not to mention future buyers of AMD videocards / APU's).
"... US$75,000 and $120,000 to mount a viable attack using freely available cloud-computing services"
That would be the quick & dirty method then, I suppose? (which admittedly is often the method of choice for black hats)
But speaking as devil's advocate here: if I were serious / determined enough to throw 75~100K$ at 'cracking some code', wouldn't it make more sense to buy some serious FPGA boards and do it in hardware? This looks like the kind of job where an FPGA-based setup could do it a lot faster, cheaper, or more efficient than some software running on cloud services.
Sure setting that up is specialist work. But hey with 75K to blow on it you can hire and/or bribe people, right? And buy a few $5 wrenches while you're at it...;-)
Btw. that might also mean that for a determined attacker (one that makes the effort to investigate methods more efficient than a software-based method using cloud services), this 75K figure may actually be lower. Read: if there's profit to be made from doing it, someone probably will - soon enough.
History only tells us that many wars have been fought (note: past tense), and for what reasons. No doubt religion and conflicts over scarce resources are high on the list. Studying history helps to understand how wars are started, why people participate in them, how they are kept going, etc, etc.
But that doesn't invalidate the simple fact: in order to end a war, the only thing people have to do, is to stop fighting. Yeah in practice it may not seem much of a choice for some people involved, but it's a choice nonetheless. Choose to stop fighting, and if everybody does the same, the war is over.
As more names are revealed, more eSports identities will be banned for life, (..)
Banned from Starcraft for life, you know how serious that is? I mean you might as well shoot them. Their life would be over. They might as well jump off a bridge after receiving that punishment.
It's even questionable if walking that distance has a smaller pollution footprint because of the energy cost needed to produce the food you ate which powers your walk to the local store. (And no, you cannot bypass this by growing a home garden. People vastly underestimate how much land is needed to grow the food we eat.
I take it you've never worked a vegetable garden, then? In theory you may be right. But your example is waaaayyy off the mark, especially using that link above as reference.
I have worked a vegetable garden for about a year, it was around 150-200 m^2 (around 1900 sq. feet?). And food that came out was moooore than enough to supply a 3-people household with all the fresh vegetables, potatoes, corn, pumpkins, and beans that we could eat. Not entirely year-round, but that was due to the more interesting problem of how to store all the produce. A lot was given away, some went to waste, a little even got stolen. Point being: the numbers given in above link don't add up, unless you're extremely bad at growing food.
Now factor in the energy needed to work all that land, and you'll quickly find that you'll need to increase your daily caloric intake to 5000-8000 kcal/day if you farm that by hand. There's a very good reason we shifted that inefficient labor-intensive task to being done by machines.
Again that's waaaay off the mark. 5000-8000 kcal/day is top athlete territory, the kind of energy burnt by pro cyclists in the Tour de France. For gardening, there's a few short weeks of 'heavy lifting' at the start of a season. No reason you couldn't do some of that using machines, btw. For the rest it's mostly remove weeds, keep an eye on things, watering, etc. Far from the kind of activity that pushes your body's energy consumption up. About as energy-intensive as walking from shop to to shop in a big mall.
Btw. that's gardening in a small plot in moderate climate. In warmer or tropical climate you may grow stuff all year round and have 2 or 3 crops per season.
Regardless, lacking evidence to the contrary I'd expect this to be mostly for show. So these hackers may get their trial. And be punished. But not before they've handed over their spoils so that Chinese government and/or manufacturers can put "stolen commercial secrets" to productive use.
Brought to you by the copy-first-ask-questions-later dept.
A port to ARM platform means you can now run the game on hardware it could NOT run on before. And given the popularity of ARM-based hardware, that's a big thing imho.
Arm ports means you have to compile yourself.
No it doesn't. It just means that someone has to compile it. Or perhaps just as likely: set up an auto-build environment, where a machine continuously integrates patches, compiles the source, runs some tests, and produces fail/success and other reports for developers to look at. Sure, it has to go through a compiler at some point, but that's true for the bulk of all software in existence.
As long as produced binaries are distributed somehow, all a user has to do is download/install and run (and whip out his Doom 3 game discs).
What, you never replaced components and/or soldered in a powered-up and operating piece of electronics? I'll take your geek card on the way out, thank you very much.
So what exactly should be done, other than never going to war, ever?
Not get/stay involved in a war when there's no direct threat to your own country? Like a poster above said, US should just leave and let Afghanistan sort out its own problems.
Sure, humanitarian reasons may be a valid reason to have troops in some other country. But is that the reason US troops are there?
Physics? Or more specific in this case: how close atoms are arranged in typical semiconductor materials, and how few of them you need at a minimum to construct useful devices. That is: without practical issues like current leakage, isolation voltages, parasitic capacitance, etc, etc, making things not-so-useful (at best). Pro tip: try integer numbers first (or just very large numbers without counting exactly how many atoms go into your device).
But please, if you know of a way to build IC's using 1/10-atom wide structures, I'm sure the engineers at IBM, Intel etc will be interested. After all, why let physics get in the way of human-invented 'laws'.
I've wasted countless hours in my life typing BASIC, only to achieve modest results. If only a more powerful language had been included in those machines... Say Forth, or C, or Lisp, or <insert structured-language-of-choice here>. Had any such language been built into popular machines of the day, science and technology would have advanced so much faster that every citizen on this planet would have had his/her own flying car and faster-than-light spaceship by now. But no... BASIC.
I've made many attempts to bring a logical structure into my BASIC programs. To number lines in steps of 10, in order to insert lines as needed. To reserve a range of line numbers for sub-routines. Only to find out that for programming, line numbers AREN'T NEEDED IN THE FIRST PLACE. Or editing - using a "LIST" command to show a few lines, move cursor to one, edit a copy of it elsewhere on screen, and have it inserted back in. Only to find out later that editing text is easily done full-screen. Yes... BASIC.
Then I found out about machine code. It was like being in coder's heaven, being God of the machine, but very difficult because it was like inching forward with tiny, dangerous steps on a minefield all the f**king time. Knowing that you'd still need that BASIC interpreter to get running, and that the same BASIC interpreter would often get in the way, and eat globs of precious RAM even though you weren't using it anymore. And that no assembler was built in, because there wasn't any room left in the ROM after putting BASIC in there. Grrr.... BASIC.
And let's not get started about the days of Disk Operating Systems. Cryptic commands to do even the simplest of tasks, that low-and-behold actually made a machine somewhat useful.
And to add insult to injury, it turned out that even for low-spec-machine-I-was-stuck-with-because-dad-couldn't-afford-anything-better, many of those more powerful languages were actually available! Some even for free! So manufacturers could have built them into their machines! But no.... BASIC.
(..) turning the United States into a Police State is exactly what the extremists want!
Which extremists are you referring to? Those very, very, very few extremists that carry bombs around? Those countless uniformed, power-abusing idiots that bully the rest of society? Or the even more dangerous idiots higher up in the chain of command?
In this context, the only thieves are those greedy bastards who think they are entitled to take money out of people's pockets, for works that were created, say 30+ years ago, which had all those years to allow creators & middlemen to profit from, and which are basically zero-cost to reproduce. Especially if end users can do the reproducing among themselves.
And you're right: at least that kind of theft should be stopped. If not by having reasonable written laws on the books, then by technical and/or economic means that bypass whatever laws are in place (or worse: regulations slipped in with trade agreements - like the one discussed here).
Personally, I've lost hope that laws (or treaties!) will be fixed. Mostly because the way they are created is broken as well, with no fix in sight. Hence the "bypass using technical and/or economic means" which imho holds more promise to fix the current situation.
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What are the motives of these terrorist groups?
Strike fear in the heart of infidels?
Help erode the freedoms that citizens in most Western countries enjoy? (especially those freedoms that enable lifestyles hated so much by Islamic State supporters).
Revenge for whatever wrongs they think were done to them? (regardless of justified or not).
As a show of force? Letting everybody know they're still here, and capable of carrying out coordinated attacks abroad.
Just to name a few - surely there's more. In the end they will not accomplish their goals. First and foremost because Islamic State seems incapable of leaving peace-loving 'neighbours' alone. Action = reaction, a law of nature. If they'd just pick some limited area to call theirs, focus on primarily peaceful (r)evolution, and leave their neighbours in peace, they might have a chance at getting just that. But if they want to conquer the world through violence, and stop at nothing in the process... well then: nope, not gonna happen.
Second, because declared enemies of Islamic State aren't going to give up their lifestyles, countries, democracies etc NO MATTER WHAT. As a typical Westerner, personally I could care less what they do in Syria, Irak or neighbouring countries. But any Islamic State fighter is welcome to try and pry my freedoms from my dead fingers in a fight on my turf. Likewise, when their actions cause millions of refugees to "invade" our countries, how could they possibly expect us to not care? Again: action = reaction.
Lastly, because no matter how many crazies are out there, they are vastly outnumbered by regular / reasonable / peace-loving people. And quite a few of those have guns too. And planes. And bombs. And an intelligence apparatus. It's like a car picking a fight with a freight train... yes it'll be ugly, but the outcome is certain: a car cannot possibly win that fight.
What does killing people randomly accomplish?
In the context of these Paris attacks, you may want to re-think in how far victims were chosen "randomly". Not to suggest in any way that victims were known or specially selected. But hey if you start shooting on a busy Paris street, you're pretty likely to hit French people, right?
Pay for it.
Depending on height of reward, that would either achieve nothing, or skew results towards low-income households. Since those would be more likely to take the money (vs. richer people who'd say "f** that, I've got more important things to do").
Once your country has been up and running for 200 years, there shouldn't be that many policies left to make.
Riiiiight.. because once a policy has been set, or a decision has been made, everything else stays the same?
NOT... Change is the only constant. That also goes for countries, populations, governments, and the (political / economic / ...) environment they operate in. So it's good to be able to base today's decisions on today's facts & numbers (and future trends in those). Not to mention that since governments are always running behind on the facts, many rules are due for an overhaul anyway.
But when talking about cheap, we (as consumers) kind of get what we pay for. Most consumers look for the cheapest they can find, sellers respond to that by buying from manufacturers that can make products the cheapest, and yes in that process, often some corners are cut. Surprise surprise.
Biggest problem there isn't that cheap crap on the market, after all: buyers can choose. But sometimes that cheap crap is so ubiquitous, that manufacturers who make better stuff get squeezed out of the market. Such that after a while, it becomes almost impossible to find better product even if you're willing to pay for it. That's apart from the problem of determining what's crap and what isn't - sometimes there's no relation with price at all.
Those end-users that are 'lucky' enough to actually receive updates once in a while.
That is THE problem with Android right now imho: leaving updates to the OS to 3rd parties that are just interested in selling a phone or call/SMS/data package, is a totally broken model. Those 3rd parties should be required to provide working drivers for the hardware in their phone, in source form, and whoever maintains the OS (Google I suppose, or maybe some industry co-operation) should take it from there. Including the distribution of updates.
Those 3rd parties have too big a tendency to sell the phone & walk away. That is easy to foresee, and has been proven time and time again. So you simply CAN NOT rely on phone makers or providers to supply updates. Period. Trying to fix the problem when it's too late, doesn't help much: even if Google changes Android update model to how it should be, that still leaves hundreds of millions of phones out there which will never ever see an update again, but still be used for a long time to come.
MINIX is obsolete.
Even if assuming that's the case: okay, so what? Things that are considered 'obsolete' are used in many places, every day, doing their thing. Often better than if done by a modern 'equivalent'.
From what I've read, MINIX has some unique features that mainstream OS'es don't have. For that reason alone there's a place for it. And it's useful as a way to learn the inner workings of an OS. Not as big and complex as an OS that supports everything under the sun.
Still not good enough hey? How about as a research vehicle? To try some new concepts that haven't been tried elsewhere. Do things that have been done elsewhere just a little different, and see how that works. Or just for the fun of it.
Especially us /. users should applaud and appreciate projects like this. There used to be a time when it seemed as if every company were working on some OS or programming language of their own. When hobbyists where beating bare metal of their PC's in assembly, even up to a GUI or 3D games. These days... not so much. Most software news these days is new releases of existing software. New versions of existing operating systems. Some new way to make existing software X work with existing software Y. Projects like MINIX that are still developed (even if slowly) are few and far between.
Last but not least: if you're not interested: fine, that's OKAY. But no reason to mock an interesting project simply because it's not your cup of tea.
This is plain and simply the gubberment desperately trying to keep all windows of the Panopticon open. Clueless old 19th century minds trying to legislate against the future and maintain their failed baboon style pyramid hierarchy.
Indeed, this smells like government either not understanding technology and where it's moving, and/or conspiring with spy agencies to get (keep?) their fingers in everything - including where they shouldn't be.
Unfortunately for them, there is no middle ground here. If the plebs can use general-purpose computers, there will be ways to get strong encryption software on it. If it's agreed you should be able to have a strongly secured connection between you and your bank (or your webmail, or your doctor, or a business partner, etc, etc, etc), then you can have such a connection between you and say, some 3rd party outside the country. If there even were a way to 'allow what goes through the pipes' (other than a North Korea-like totalitarian regime), only allowing weak encryption would make a lot of present-day applications impossible, to the point where businesses would be forced to set up shop elsewhere. Of course we all know that even a government with a half a brain cell wouldn't let that happen.
Which simply leaves the other option: strong encryption in the hands of the public, possibly outside of the reach of government, law enforcement or spy agencies. Not to mention that if not allowed, technology together with the public will find ways around that.
Which would force those parties to either accept a more reasonable approach, attack encryption-using criminals through the legal system, social engineering and such, or attack implementations and endpoints of encryption use. Oh wait.. wasn't that the easiest method anyway? lol :-))
Oh come on... If it weren't for graphene, Duke Nukem Forever would never have been released!
If you didn't have the memory of a goldfish you would have noticed that only a few of the many battery improvements written about ten years ago have made it to market at all.
There, FTFY.
The road from lab to product is long and full of speed bumps (or rather: unexpected craters in the road). If you look at actually available products, battery tech is a steadily improving but SLOW moving market. A good analogy is open source software: on a regular basis there's important releases (that actually bring something new to the table), and the occasional surprise. But overall, it's a very gradually evolving ecosystem.
Care to explain how? If you mean by hacking a driver such that it produces more fps, then (by that logic) simply plugging in a faster GPU would qualify as cheating too. Note that the 'faster-GPU-cheat' is considered perfectly acceptable for online gaming, only exception being pro gaming tournaments where I'd expect all participants to have same-configured machines.
In case you were thinking about see-through-wall hacks, mods that help with aiming etc: those things are in game engines not graphics drivers.
What I don't understand is why AMD bothers to keep Catalyst around, when a) they've already shown to be supportive towards open source, b) Catalyst drivers have always been considered crap compared vs. their Nvidia counterpart (by most gamers anyway), and c) the open drivers have made leaps & bounds of progress in the last few years.
Supporting both the open and closed source drivers will surely take more resources than focussing the effort on one of them. And I kind of doubt that AMD has much resources to spare for this kind of thing. The open drivers have caught up to Catalyst quite a bit lately, why not work towards replacing Catalyst with it? That would make everybody on AMD side of the fence happy I think (not to mention future buyers of AMD videocards / APU's).
"... US$75,000 and $120,000 to mount a viable attack using freely available cloud-computing services"
That would be the quick & dirty method then, I suppose? (which admittedly is often the method of choice for black hats)
But speaking as devil's advocate here: if I were serious / determined enough to throw 75~100K$ at 'cracking some code', wouldn't it make more sense to buy some serious FPGA boards and do it in hardware? This looks like the kind of job where an FPGA-based setup could do it a lot faster, cheaper, or more efficient than some software running on cloud services.
Sure setting that up is specialist work. But hey with 75K to blow on it you can hire and/or bribe people, right? And buy a few $5 wrenches while you're at it... ;-)
Btw. that might also mean that for a determined attacker (one that makes the effort to investigate methods more efficient than a software-based method using cloud services), this 75K figure may actually be lower. Read: if there's profit to be made from doing it, someone probably will - soon enough.
History only tells us that many wars have been fought (note: past tense), and for what reasons. No doubt religion and conflicts over scarce resources are high on the list. Studying history helps to understand how wars are started, why people participate in them, how they are kept going, etc, etc.
But that doesn't invalidate the simple fact: in order to end a war, the only thing people have to do, is to stop fighting. Yeah in practice it may not seem much of a choice for some people involved, but it's a choice nonetheless. Choose to stop fighting, and if everybody does the same, the war is over.
From one of the linked articles:
As more names are revealed, more eSports identities will be banned for life, (..)
Banned from Starcraft for life, you know how serious that is? I mean you might as well shoot them. Their life would be over. They might as well jump off a bridge after receiving that punishment.
It's even questionable if walking that distance has a smaller pollution footprint because of the energy cost needed to produce the food you ate which powers your walk to the local store. (And no, you cannot bypass this by growing a home garden. People vastly underestimate how much land is needed to grow the food we eat.
I take it you've never worked a vegetable garden, then? In theory you may be right. But your example is waaaayyy off the mark, especially using that link above as reference.
I have worked a vegetable garden for about a year, it was around 150-200 m^2 (around 1900 sq. feet?). And food that came out was moooore than enough to supply a 3-people household with all the fresh vegetables, potatoes, corn, pumpkins, and beans that we could eat. Not entirely year-round, but that was due to the more interesting problem of how to store all the produce. A lot was given away, some went to waste, a little even got stolen. Point being: the numbers given in above link don't add up, unless you're extremely bad at growing food.
Now factor in the energy needed to work all that land, and you'll quickly find that you'll need to increase your daily caloric intake to 5000-8000 kcal/day if you farm that by hand. There's a very good reason we shifted that inefficient labor-intensive task to being done by machines.
Again that's waaaay off the mark. 5000-8000 kcal/day is top athlete territory, the kind of energy burnt by pro cyclists in the Tour de France. For gardening, there's a few short weeks of 'heavy lifting' at the start of a season. No reason you couldn't do some of that using machines, btw. For the rest it's mostly remove weeds, keep an eye on things, watering, etc. Far from the kind of activity that pushes your body's energy consumption up. About as energy-intensive as walking from shop to to shop in a big mall.
Btw. that's gardening in a small plot in moderate climate. In warmer or tropical climate you may grow stuff all year round and have 2 or 3 crops per season.
Regardless, lacking evidence to the contrary I'd expect this to be mostly for show. So these hackers may get their trial. And be punished. But not before they've handed over their spoils so that Chinese government and/or manufacturers can put "stolen commercial secrets" to productive use.
Brought to you by the copy-first-ask-questions-later dept.
A port to ARM platform means you can now run the game on hardware it could NOT run on before. And given the popularity of ARM-based hardware, that's a big thing imho.
Arm ports means you have to compile yourself.
No it doesn't. It just means that someone has to compile it. Or perhaps just as likely: set up an auto-build environment, where a machine continuously integrates patches, compiles the source, runs some tests, and produces fail/success and other reports for developers to look at. Sure, it has to go through a compiler at some point, but that's true for the bulk of all software in existence.
As long as produced binaries are distributed somehow, all a user has to do is download/install and run (and whip out his Doom 3 game discs).
What, you never replaced components and/or soldered in a powered-up and operating piece of electronics? I'll take your geek card on the way out, thank you very much.
So what exactly should be done, other than never going to war, ever?
Not get/stay involved in a war when there's no direct threat to your own country? Like a poster above said, US should just leave and let Afghanistan sort out its own problems.
Sure, humanitarian reasons may be a valid reason to have troops in some other country. But is that the reason US troops are there?
Physics? Or more specific in this case: how close atoms are arranged in typical semiconductor materials, and how few of them you need at a minimum to construct useful devices. That is: without practical issues like current leakage, isolation voltages, parasitic capacitance, etc, etc, making things not-so-useful (at best). Pro tip: try integer numbers first (or just very large numbers without counting exactly how many atoms go into your device).
But please, if you know of a way to build IC's using 1/10-atom wide structures, I'm sure the engineers at IBM, Intel etc will be interested. After all, why let physics get in the way of human-invented 'laws'.
Built-in BASIC = cool, you say? Damn you!
I've wasted countless hours in my life typing BASIC, only to achieve modest results. If only a more powerful language had been included in those machines... Say Forth, or C, or Lisp, or <insert structured-language-of-choice here>. Had any such language been built into popular machines of the day, science and technology would have advanced so much faster that every citizen on this planet would have had his/her own flying car and faster-than-light spaceship by now. But no... BASIC.
I've made many attempts to bring a logical structure into my BASIC programs. To number lines in steps of 10, in order to insert lines as needed. To reserve a range of line numbers for sub-routines. Only to find out that for programming, line numbers AREN'T NEEDED IN THE FIRST PLACE. Or editing - using a "LIST" command to show a few lines, move cursor to one, edit a copy of it elsewhere on screen, and have it inserted back in. Only to find out later that editing text is easily done full-screen. Yes... BASIC.
Then I found out about machine code. It was like being in coder's heaven, being God of the machine, but very difficult because it was like inching forward with tiny, dangerous steps on a minefield all the f**king time. Knowing that you'd still need that BASIC interpreter to get running, and that the same BASIC interpreter would often get in the way, and eat globs of precious RAM even though you weren't using it anymore. And that no assembler was built in, because there wasn't any room left in the ROM after putting BASIC in there. Grrr.... BASIC.
And let's not get started about the days of Disk Operating Systems. Cryptic commands to do even the simplest of tasks, that low-and-behold actually made a machine somewhat useful.
And to add insult to injury, it turned out that even for low-spec-machine-I-was-stuck-with-because-dad-couldn't-afford-anything-better, many of those more powerful languages were actually available! Some even for free! So manufacturers could have built them into their machines! But no.... BASIC.
Now, if only older Windows versions did that *without* the auto-upgrade-to-Windows-10 bullshit...
Supermodels have been bullying me for years now by refusing to go out with me!!! Help! I'm being oppressed!
If at first, dating a supermodel does not succeed, redefine "supermodel".
(..) turning the United States into a Police State is exactly what the extremists want!
Which extremists are you referring to? Those very, very, very few extremists that carry bombs around? Those countless uniformed, power-abusing idiots that bully the rest of society? Or the even more dangerous idiots higher up in the chain of command?
In this context, the only thieves are those greedy bastards who think they are entitled to take money out of people's pockets, for works that were created, say 30+ years ago, which had all those years to allow creators & middlemen to profit from, and which are basically zero-cost to reproduce. Especially if end users can do the reproducing among themselves.
And you're right: at least that kind of theft should be stopped. If not by having reasonable written laws on the books, then by technical and/or economic means that bypass whatever laws are in place (or worse: regulations slipped in with trade agreements - like the one discussed here).
Personally, I've lost hope that laws (or treaties!) will be fixed. Mostly because the way they are created is broken as well, with no fix in sight. Hence the "bypass using technical and/or economic means" which imho holds more promise to fix the current situation.