I think you've confused "smart phone" as being synonymous with "cell phone." My cell phone does none of those things, and I'm very happy with it -- especially since it costs very little to replace should something happen to it, costs much less per month to operate, has a removable battery, and can hold a charge for weeks at a time.
I have computers in my home, of course, but "OK Google" and Cortana are switched off. My Android tablet can take OK Google Commands -- but of course, only when I have it turned on.
The real question is -- when did everyone become sheep that were OK with spyware, adware, data-mining, and voice-activation that phones home crap. Talked to a friend the other day about Moviepass & how they hope to leverage their users habits and GPS data to make money... got a "so what? Every app spies on you these days and it doesn't really affect me." Baaaaa Sheep.
The EM drive does use fuel - just not a propellant. It also gives such a small amount of thrust, one can only measure it with a carefully controlled setup. This experiment basically proves the thrust is created from the charged craft interacting with Earth's magnetic field.... and the thrust doesn't go up much if any as the power on the craft goes from 5 watts to 50 watts. So, we're basically looking at motion powered by Earth's EM, not the craft's EM.
We have about as much of a chance of boosting a craft into low Earth orbit with this as we do using a compass.
Perhaps it'll be useful for something one day, but all I can come up with right now would be Back to the Future II style hoverboards, but for dust mites instead of people given what little thrust it gives -- also it is hard to steer given it tends to only move in alignment with Earth's magnetic field.
That's not my understanding of what happened. NVIDIA said that NVIDIA products needed their own brand that was separate from the AMD brand. Suppliers did have the option of creating a separate brand just for NVIDIA, but none did. Instead, they kept the gaming brand they already had and made it exclusively for NVIDIA while some created a second brand for AMD.
For instance, ASUS kept the ROG (Republic of Gamers) for NVIDIA, but created AREZ for AMD for graphics cards. There was nothing in the deal requiring that to happen. They could have kept ROG for AMD and made a separate brand for NVIDIA.
In practice, though -- everyone knows NVIDIA's cards are better for the most part on the high end, so of course the trusted high-end gaming brand goes to NVIDIA.
You know ASUS is likely unhappy about having to carry a second brand just for AMD. They have ROG motherboards and graphics cards and would like to just keep ROG for everything high-end and high-quality regardless of what's powering it. They will probably end the AREZ line soon now that the program is cancelled.
Copyright is a legal right created by the law of a country that grants the creator of an original work exclusive rights for its use and distribution.
So, let me get this straight. He was selling (violation) copy-written works he'd copied (violation) to disks and distributed (violation) for a use not approved by the author of the work.
He's not allowed to copy anything without written permission, not allowed to sell a copyrighted work without written permission, and also not allowed to distribute a copyrighted work without permission.
No one disputes he was violating copyright law. The judge was sympathetic to what he was trying to do. The only thing people argued about was the value of the disks themselves in how they relate to damages to the copyright author. Microsoft wanted each disk to represent a potential lost license sale (as only they should be distributing restore disks and if people can't burn their own, they will have to buy a new license to have a functioning PC... or buy a new PC with a license), the defense wanted the disks to be worth zero or near zero. They ultimately were decided to be worth something in-between
That's odd. My cable modem runs on Linux. So does my wireless router. Oh, look! Even my Rokus run Linux. Strange how user-friendly each of these interfaces are. Rokus are extremely popular, and so easy to set up, I have family in their mid to late 60s setting them up by themselves with no help from their technically inclined family members.
Linux's failure on the desktop is due to many reasons, though I believe it's mostly due to lack of game support. Most people use their cell phones (Android is king here) for just about everything they need for personal use. Home desktops are mostly dead except for gamers. Average users have laptops or netbooks for things their phones can't do well.
So why is Linux failing in the laptop/netbook arena? Inertia. Chromebooks, Apple, and Microsoft pretty much have the market locked down. There's little incentive for manufacturers to use Linux over ChromeOS or Windows. In a world where people will gladly install spyware for free apps and games, using Linux has to have a selling point other than it being free or even mostly compatible. Ubuntu tried and failed to gain entry into the cell phone, tablet, netbook, and notebook arena. But, the fight isn't over. If/when STEAMOS gets perfected and/or Linux gets decent graphics drivers and game support, it'll finally be competitive on the desktop.
People hardly notice that I have a Linux machine -- because I have Gnome set to look like Windows & I can launch Chrome and check g-mail or watch Netflix or Youtube or Twitch. Most everything I run regularly on my Windows box can be run on my Linux box just as easily -- except games. I hate using WINE, so until gaming is where it should be, I'll be keeping my windows installs.
There's way too many factors for me to judge. I'll wait to see what the Uber tech's say.
As you mentioned, the Uber might have seen her on LIDAR, and hey... she had a bike -- maybe the Uber thought she was riding the bike in her lane and never predicted she might move in front of the UBER. Or, maybe the UBER had a glitch (it happens... that's what the driver is there for.).
The driver certainly wasn't paying as much attention to the road as he/she should have. Some states have laws against distracted driving, and I would hope Uber would want their backup drivers to be alert with both hands on the wheel at all times.
Maybe the driver could have averted this collision if they had been paying more attention and were better prepared to turn the wheel and/or hit the brakes, but we may never know.
As for the pedestrian, some reports have surfaced that she may have been a habitual drug user. If those reports are accurate -- and I don't mean to disparage her in any way -- but, if they are accurate, it's possible she may have been using drugs and may not have been thinking clearly about her decision to cross the multi-lane road that far from a crosswalk with oncoming traffic.
In any case, it's a horrible accident that probably could have been prevented if the two humans involved had been more careful.
I think it would be more important that one prove that any such illegal content can be purged from the network. If files, programs, or data unrelated to the use of the crypto currency as a currency and distributed ledger can be inserted, then there needs to be a way to remove it to prevent further distribution of potentially illegal content.
If any extraneous data cannot be removed, then ban the currency (hopefully merely leading to a fork that is compliant.)
If dangerous top secret information were to be disseminated via Bitcoin blockchain tech, that'd be a serious national security issue & we'd ban it immediately. It's the designer's fault for including a feature without thinking through nefarious uses and a way to isolate the damage and purge the corruption of the system.
In your example, one can at least delete a corrupted file or destroy an encrypted disk. How does one delete this included data from the Bitcoin network without destroying the currency or the transaction network? Maybe it can be done, but I haven't read anything yet on how to purge these unwanted files yet.
You do know that "Nexus" devices weren't manufactured by Google, right? My Nexus 7 (2013 model) was made by ASUS. Just because they slapped the Nexus or Pixel name on someone else's product and put plain stock android on them didn't make them any easier to support. They weren't granted the IP to their internals.
Also, Google has been pretty straightforward about their crappy support. Nexus and Pixel lines at least got pretty immediate upgrades while other brands waited years sometimes to update Android (and they were the lucky ones -- some NEVER got a newer OS!)
I'm hoping Lineage OS takes over where Android drops the ball.... but I've yet to see anything but perpetual betas from them.
I think you misunderstand capitalism. There have always been products that have reached peak innovation and have become ubiquitous, cheap, and offered by many suppliers at prices very near to their cost. They are called commodities.
A great example of commodities are foods in the produce aisle. Sure, people grow and sell specialty cultivars (sometimes even with patents! -- especially the GMOs), but by and large... they're commodities.
Screws, nails, hinges, bolts, nuts, pine wood, and many other things used in construction are commodities.
The cell phone has a long way to go before it becomes a commodity unencumbered by patents, but its product life cycle will eventually be extended -- just like desktop PCs and laptops have gone from 2 year cycles to 3 year cycles... to 5 year and now 7 year cycles or longer. If/when Moore's Law prevents further die shrinks, we'll probably see some architecture changes that will keep things chugging along for a while..... and new battery technologies as well. But, sooner or later, after we've gotten the right architecture on the smallest sized chip with the best possible battery running on the fastest speed (5G or faster), and the patents run out on the hardware and the license restrictions on software are gone -- boom. Cell phone becomes a commodity with little to no change and cheap price.
What drives the market is the exchange of goods and services. People are always going to need things they can't reasonably make/grow for themselves and have time and/or money to trade for those things. Capitalism doesn't live and die by computer/cell phone technology innovations. It's been around since long before computers existed. Plenty of other things to make and improve -- lots of new areas that need innovation as well. But, even if we become hyper advanced to where everything that could be invented has been and we have no new applications for that technology... people will still need stuff & still be willing to work or trade with others for that stuff in exchange for stuff that their trading partners want in return. That's the core of capitalism.
MPEG is from the pre-internet era of media. Back when content was purchased on disk, it made sense to have a licensed standard for MPEG, MPEG2, and even MP3. MPEG4 for Blu-Ray was really the last gasp.
Now, everything is streamed online. While Hollywood was fine paying a few cents on the dollar for encryption and compression on disks, streaming media sites are looking to cut costs.
Netflix, Hulu, Google/Youtube, and others are big enough to make their own standards and cut out the MPEG group entirely. They even have different goals as there are different methods to adjust quality over live streams vs a pre-compressed file.
I can't say I'll be sad to see MPEG go -- they were vicious in protecting their licensing and downright bullying in their negotiations, and the lack of alternatives held back progress for years. Now that real alternatives are here, they want to change... ha. good luck w/ that.
I tend to agree. Meltdown had an obvious path to exploit -- run an unauthorized branch of code to access something one shouldn't, then make sure another bit of code read that unauthorized data before it was flagged and wiped. Spectre.... it's just snooping on random processes hoping to find something interesting at the same user-level access.
In a jewelry store theft comparison:
Meltdown -- walk in as a celebrity, ask the jeweler if you can view a specific priceless ring that only celebrities could afford, and then you bolt for the door as soon as the ring is on your finger. You got exactly what you wanted.
Spectre -- walk in, try to grab any ring an average customer is presently inspecting... assuming there are any customers and any of them are viewing any rings during your visit. You have no idea what you're going to get, if anything.... but whatever you DO get, it won't be the specific ring in Meltdown you could have gotten.
Biology is an emergent property of chemistry which is an emergent property of physics. There are lots of examples of physical properties of materials that are emergent properties.
Emergent behavior and processes are all around us and are studied by actual scientists in various fields specifically created to study emergent behavior -- many with the goal of learning how that behavior emerges from the underlying physics so that one can predict new properties of future materials.
Especially since by using an ISP for government entities, they'd want to ensure that their own ISP would adhere to NN principles not only for themselves, but for citizens and employees throughout the state to be able to access their services with certain reasonable expectations (such as those defined by NN).
The state has a vested interest in ensuring timely, affordable public and employee access to their services unbarred by ISP interference.
16.04 is an LTS release. Most servers run the LTS version of Ubuntu. So, while your average Joe is fine with upgrading every 6 months, there are a massive number of production servers running an almost two year old LTS about to upgrade to this, and their sysadmin concerns have to be taken into account before this is released. It's going to have to keep them happy for another two years 'til the next release as well.
Ubuntu is smart enough to keep that backwards compatibility upon upgrade or replacement for this specific release for those sysadmins. It's a small concession to leave X.org as the default upon login to keep them happy for the next two years.
I wouldn't be surprised if 16.10 flips the options to make Wayland the default as it wouldn't affect those remaining on LTS & it gives developers more time to shift to Wayland. Most of the programs I use have partial Wayland support, but it's improving -- VLC, Firefox, Chrome/Chromium... and Nvidia is slowly coming around with Wayland compatible drivers. But, it's not there yet -- I wouldn't want Wayland as the default for an LTS version either w/ it's current state. It's not polished, but it's good enough for average users not running production LTS servers.
Yes, I understand the implications... and I assume the longer the pipeline, the worse the effects. (and the industry has been pushing for ever longer pipelines). But, we're dealing with 4 Ghz chips. Intel's chips have voltage regulators to adjust to load, and most of the time, a consumer's CPU is idling at 5%. If we get say.. a 20% hit for turning off branch speculation completely.... then would that effectively mean the chip would act like a 3.2 Ghz CPU instead of a 4 Ghz CPU? Keeping in mind that those 4 Ghz CPUs largely have an idling speed, a working speed, and a "boost" speed that's above 4 Ghz for certain cores; would Joe/Jane Sixpack who uses his laptop for Facebook, Netflix, Gmail, and Youtube as the majority of his/her computing needs really even notice? Especially with quad cores? And the future systems are coming with hex cores, octa cores, etc.
Branch prediction is great for accelerating program speed, but having multiple cores means more work can be done simultaneously as well (even if not as fast without the branch prediction. I'm just reminded of the single-core days when every program had to fight for CPU time, but now with multi-core and hyperthreading, so many threads can be done at once that maybe speeding things up by branch prediction doesn't have as big of an impact in terms of human interaction as it once did.
Intel has been lowering its CPU speeds as it adds cores to keep the thermal envelope low -- especially in laptops. It's kind of an admission that multi-core is more important than core speed. But, if disabling branching has the same affect on speed as lowering the clock speed on a branch-enabled CPU, then... I just wonder if maybe disabling it altogether for security reasons would be a better path until we can fix the architectural issues. Seems these "garbage patches" are causing instabilities & many systems need a BIOS update to go with a micro-code update... and manufacturers loathe to update any BIOS for systems more than a year or so old.
I have a friend purchasing a 12 core i9 (24 threads) with 32 GB of RAM next month... and I'm just thinking... Would this guy even notice if branch speculation were disabled?!?!? The base frequency is 2.90 GHz, the Turbo is 4.30 GHz. Assuming the biggest hit was 20%, that still gives the Turbo speed of 3.44 Ghz... and the system might spend more time at a higher frequency than the base to offset the performance hit.
Now, I'm not saying we should kill branch prediction in future development, but we should probably re-evaluate how it's done if security is an issue. In the meantime, retpoline seems like a good trade-off & there are other good ideas. I would just like some data on what it would actually do in the "real world" if we shut off the insecure branch prediction completely... because I have a sneaky suspicion that unless one is working on heavily CPU-bound tasks, it wouldn't be noticeable to your average user. CAD workers, video transcoders, AI developers -- sure, they'd opt out b/c of the hit they'd take... but many might just prefer stability over crappy patches & not notice the hit at all.
I would like to see some benchmarks to see exactly what would happen if we killed branch prediction. I bet Intel has a command to turn it off for debugging.
No doubt it'd kill performance, but I'm curious by how much.
For instance, the Raspberry Pi 3's CPU doesn't include any branch prediction at all. It runs at 1.2 Ghz. Different architecture, obviously, but still. If it can chug along pretty good playing h.264 video, run Netflix from Chromium, and do quite a lot of things rather well with a crippled chipset and relatively slow 1.2 Ghz speed (and hobbled RAM, etc)... seems a 4 Ghz Intel chip might not be so bad off without branch prediction.
I have a Core i7 -- quad core, L1, L2, and L3 cache, hyperthreading enabled. CPU rarely hits above 20% -- more often in the 5% to 12% range unless I'm doing video transcoding which makes it hit closer to 80% - 95%. I'd think the lost cycles from a lack of branch prediction would hit transcoding and other CPU-intensive things really hard, but maybe not so much for other random, everyday things.
Eh, maybe, maybe not. I just think it's interesting that the Pi's CPUs (along with some other embedded CPUs) don't use branch prediction at all -- mostly to save power and keep heat down. Clearly the Pi's CPU is no speed demon, but it's "good enough" for a lot of uses. At what point might an Intel CPU without any branch prediction be "good enough?"
Also, it's a bit unfair to break out the "desktop" as being just a tower system when there are all-in-one PCs and laptops with docking stations that have all the peripherals of a PC. I've worked several places where everyone had a laptop on a dock and would then take their laptop home if they needed to do more work via VPN. For the user, the difference between a docked laptop and a tower were slim to none while at work. Even with the internals of a "desktop," we're starting to see new form factors for parts for PCIe and SATA that could fit inside a laptop. The lines are blurring.
I've got a laptop, a desktop, and a tablet (Nexus 7 2013). That desktop is about 11 years old, but it still plays Netflix, Youtube, and other streaming media just fine. I'm about to replace it with a new gaming PC because while my 4-5 year old gaming laptop can play most games just fine, I want to also stream the games on Twitch and/or do other things in the background while gaming plus have my laptop up for other things. (plus, it'd be nice to have a 6+ core PC for video transcoding).
I'm atypical -- most people I know have a 5 to 8 year old laptop and a cell phone. (I just use my tablet and have an ancient flip phone b/c I like the battery life and lower monthly fees).
So, yeah... the "desktop" is dead in the sense that all but power users moved to laptops with multiple monitors and the same peripherals as their old desktops. I even know gamers that use just a laptop. But mostly, the life cycle of the devices just lengthened because there is no killer application to motivate people to buy a newer one. I doubt VR will be that killer ap -- maybe AI.
Unless you're in CAD/design/animation/special effects/video encoding, etc... laptops are fine... and even the monstrous tower PCs are good for a decade unless time is an important factor. Even some of those high-end jobs can be offloaded to a supercomputer / "cloud".
considering what little CPU percentage is used by the average PC user, there may be an argument for desktops and laptops not needing it either.... Maybe even for data centers where large caches are more important than branch predictions.
I know, I know... Insanity! Branch prediction is like... 75% to 99% correct, so it's not that much of a waste... and pipelines are long... but, Intel just helped put out a patch that wipes cache when switching between user mode and kernel mode and your average user can't tell their machine is 5% to 20% slower... b/c their quad core CPU is idling below 10% anyway.
The trend lately is towards low power chips for users at all levels -- even data centers... and trending towards mobility for users. Phones, tablets, chromebooks, laptops that are basically tablets, etc.
If I have to decide between a fat cache that doesn't get flushed in the name of security vs speculative processing... for whatever spectre or related exploit may be around the corner, I think I might rather have the cache. If every time a file server randomly accesses a database, their entire cache is flushed to protect against a bug... I could see where turning off branch prediction if possible might be a better solution than flushing the cache. A cache miss can be huge -- many orders of magnitude longer than waiting several cycles to execute something that wasn't predicted, but was pre-fetched at least.
False. Out of order execution alone isn't enough. Spectre was NAMED after "speculation" -- branch prediction. The ARM core in the Raspberry Pi DOES NOT USE THIS.
Meltdown affects ONLY Intel because they allowed a special type of branch prediction for illegal operations, Spectre affects many CPUs that use branch prediction, but is much more difficult to exploit as each exploit would have to target a specific cpu or cpu family -- not a generic exploit that would work on nearly every Intel CPU since the mid 90s.
Many CPUs use branch prediction in order to gain some performance when they guess correctly, but that's at the cost of using more power and the risk of wasting that power on bad guesses -- which is why some ARM chips (like the one Pi uses) avoid it completely.
Eh, ymmv. Mint is more focused on providing a very stable, very polished experience. It does not necessarily update when Ubuntu updates. You could think of Mint as being a kind of Ubuntu LTS release. In fact, the next Mint will be based on an Ubuntu LTS release. So, if you have newer hardware, you may want Ubuntu instead for a newer kernel and better driver support (along with newer versions of your fav. software). I personally prefer Ubuntu because it is more cutting edge with Nvidia drivers, Wayland support, and newer Kernels. I have used Mint in the past on older hardware, and it was beautiful. Now I use Ubuntu with Cinnamon -- though you should know that Cinnamon on Ubuntu doesn't have the polish or all the features of Cinnamon on Mint. So, I sometimes boot to Gnome on Ubuntu -- mostly to test out Wayland support.
As for Cinnamon vs Mate -- you're really comparing a Gnome 3 fork to a Gnome 2 fork. Cinnamon has more features, but takes up more resources. I'd prefer Cinnamon -- but on older, slower machines with limited RAM, Mate is pretty darned nice. I also keep Mate installed just in case I have an issue with another DE.
I like to test bleeding edge development builds of Ubuntu, so I get my fair share of bugs & so it's great to have a backup DE like Mate to switch to if a bug won't let me load into Gnome or Cinnamon.
Notes on Cinnamon -- before Cinnamon 3.2, it was really buggy and crashed often on multiple systems I had it on. It used to leak memory like crazy and have to be re-started... but after 3.4, it was rock solid and gorgeous. I think it's up to 3.7 now.
Notes on Mint -- I had an issue where I couldn't enable Zram a couple years back b/c it wasn't supported on the kernel that came with Mint -- or any that were in the Mint repo. So, I installed a newer kernel... I think 3.14 manually... got that working properly. Then, I had an issue with VLC playing a x.264 file that a newer version of VLC fixed... but, I had to manually install the newer VLC b/c it wasn't in Mint's repo. Same thing for a driver issue... Eventually, I had SO MANY bits of software that I was updating manually for compatibility reasons (like having the same versions of LibreOffice as another machine, etc.), that I ended up adding the entire Ubuntu current repository to Mint... which merged Mint with Ubuntu -- and that worked for a bit... until I got some nasty dependency issues as my hybrid Franken-Mint-Ubuntu had issues with some updates and changes. Ended up wiping it and just installing Ubuntu with Cinnamon since obviously I couldn't live with plain vanilla Mint.
You may have no issues at all for what Mint has to offer -- especially since it's caught up to Ubuntu for the next release... but, as things drift, you may change your mind. Depends on whether you're an LTS kinda person or a twice yearly release kinda person -- or like me... a twice yearly on some things, rolling release or development on others.
AMD checks privileges before it runs the code. Intel chose to optimize their branch prediction in a way that checked the privileges AFTER the code was run, but before it was written/applied. This allowed a small window for someone to read the results of that illegal instruction before it was dumped for being flagged as an exception.
I've read some info that speculates that Intel likely gained some performance by letting a lot of branch predictions run and then dumping those that are flagged after the fact instead of checking each and every one before it was run (because a lot of branches are dumped anyway for other reasons, so small price to pay to let things run and be wrong.) I don't know for sure, though. Sounds to me like they skimped on some silicon to check in hardware and put more into branch prediction.
Basically the code runs like this:
Hi, I'm a user program with user rights. I'd like to know where the super secret memory address of this part of the system is so I can read from it... and maybe even write to it later with a different exploit.
AMD: No, you're in user land, you can't see kernel land. end of story
Intel: Oh, let me fetch that for you... Here, I've typed up a handy map of things and notes on your way around the super-secret areas... just show me your security clearance first before I hand it over. Your malware: *glances at map, notes* Intel: WAIT... you're in user land. You can't have this. *lights the map and notes on fire after you've already seen them*
More like... the monorail has to do something useful. When I stayed there not long after the monorail opened, it was difficult to find and it took longer to walk to the monorail itself and then to my destination than to just walk to my destination anyway. I stayed at Bally's. I could walk anywhere I wanted to go -- the sidewalks are wide in Vegas, the streets have crosswalks that go over and above the streets. The strip is really designed for walking -- plus, the entrances are beautiful and facing the street.
The track is 4 miles long, it's hidden a block over from the boulevard.... behind the huge hotel/casinos on one side of the strip. I checked Google Maps & it's over 1,000 ft from the entrances of most of the hotels -- sometimes double that.
Here's the stations:
SLS, Westgate, Las Vegas Convention Center, Harrah's / The Linq, Flamingo/Caesars Palace, Bally's / Paris Las Vegas, MGM Grand
Now note -- this is only a 4 mile strip and only on one side of the street. It feels like you're in a back alley going to find this monorail. Beyond that, there's really only a few of these I'd care to visit anyway -- Bally's, Paris, Ceasar's, and MGM Grand. Those are all pretty close to one another, so no idea why I'd want to walk over 1000 ft to a monorail just to walk 1000 ft again to the entrance of one of those destinations. Also... it being on only one side of the street, to get to say.. Luxor from Bally's, it'd be 1000 ft to the station, a fee, a wait time, then 1000ft from MGM Grand station to the boulevard, then I'd cross the street and walk some more to get to Luxor. If it actually went from Bally's to Luxor, it might possibly be worth it, but I could take a taxi if I didn't feel like walking that far anyway.
The monorail doesn't even connect to the international airport! You'd think if I flew into Las Vegas's McCarran International Airport, I'd be tempted to buy a monorail ticket if it meant I could load my luggage on and be ferried to my hotel.
I've been on public transportation that was useful. Atlanta's MARTA is awesome. How Vegas screwed this up, I don't know... but it's like a monorail to nowhere for people that want to travel just to get to and from the monorail system.
There is no law requiring businesses to take payments in cash. Even businesses that choose to take cash can refuse to take certain coins or bills. Ever seen a sign that says "exact change only" or a "No bills larger than a $10 accepted?"
Governments must accept cash, but businesses can do what they like. They could charge you in jelly beans if they wish. If you take their goods or services without paying them in the agreed/posted amount of jelly beans, then you'd be guilty of theft or theft of services. That could land you in civil court if it were a contract payment -- say you were to pay 5,000 jellybeans per month and suddenly stopped shipments. In that case, they'd sue, and then a judge would either compel you to produce the required jellybeans or a cash equivalent. If you simply took an item without payment in jellybeans, you'd likely be arrested and taken to criminal court then have to return the stolen items or make restitution for stolen services in either jellybeans or cash.... plus additional fines, jail time, etc.
This isn't some undefined area of law that hasn't been explored. Physical US bills and coins are legal tender for state and federal governments. There is zero legislation compelling businesses to use them. There are businesses in the USA that do business using strips of precious metals -- because they have lost faith in US currency. There are businesses that exclusively use tokens -- like casinos in Vegas that use them for gambling. There are some businesses that exclusively barter for items and have no cash involved whatsoever!
Credit cards, Debit cards, pre-loaded cards, and gift cards aren't radically different than tokens. Anyone can go to WalMart and buy a pre-loaded VISA or Mastercard without having to have a bank account, much less good credit. You can argue that they're discriminatory all you like, but not only is it a poor argument to make, there's no legal standing for disallowing such discrimination. One can't discriminate based on race, sex, religion, and many other factors for most for-profit entities, but there's no law against discriminating against poor people. There's no law against discriminating based upon credit rating either.
Frankly, most online businesses already require a credit card of some sort & the few that don't require a checking account instead. (A few rare businesses will take a cashier's check or a moneygram, but hey... may as well get a pre-loaded card if you're going to go through that trouble!) No online business takes cash through the mail, and most don't have a physical presence where you could take cash if you wanted to.
So, yeah, I personally think it sucks that fewer places are taking cash, but it's not illegal. Never was -- won't be no matter how much you hold your breath, turn blue, and act like Donald Trump by doubling down on something when you're wrong.
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moissanite is the mineral form of silicon carbide they listed
I think you've confused "smart phone" as being synonymous with "cell phone." My cell phone does none of those things, and I'm very happy with it -- especially since it costs very little to replace should something happen to it, costs much less per month to operate, has a removable battery, and can hold a charge for weeks at a time.
I have computers in my home, of course, but "OK Google" and Cortana are switched off. My Android tablet can take OK Google Commands -- but of course, only when I have it turned on.
The real question is -- when did everyone become sheep that were OK with spyware, adware, data-mining, and voice-activation that phones home crap. Talked to a friend the other day about Moviepass & how they hope to leverage their users habits and GPS data to make money... got a "so what? Every app spies on you these days and it doesn't really affect me." Baaaaa Sheep.
The EM drive does use fuel - just not a propellant. It also gives such a small amount of thrust, one can only measure it with a carefully controlled setup. This experiment basically proves the thrust is created from the charged craft interacting with Earth's magnetic field.... and the thrust doesn't go up much if any as the power on the craft goes from 5 watts to 50 watts. So, we're basically looking at motion powered by Earth's EM, not the craft's EM.
We have about as much of a chance of boosting a craft into low Earth orbit with this as we do using a compass.
Perhaps it'll be useful for something one day, but all I can come up with right now would be Back to the Future II style hoverboards, but for dust mites instead of people given what little thrust it gives -- also it is hard to steer given it tends to only move in alignment with Earth's magnetic field.
That's not my understanding of what happened. NVIDIA said that NVIDIA products needed their own brand that was separate from the AMD brand. Suppliers did have the option of creating a separate brand just for NVIDIA, but none did. Instead, they kept the gaming brand they already had and made it exclusively for NVIDIA while some created a second brand for AMD.
For instance, ASUS kept the ROG (Republic of Gamers) for NVIDIA, but created AREZ for AMD for graphics cards. There was nothing in the deal requiring that to happen. They could have kept ROG for AMD and made a separate brand for NVIDIA.
In practice, though -- everyone knows NVIDIA's cards are better for the most part on the high end, so of course the trusted high-end gaming brand goes to NVIDIA.
You know ASUS is likely unhappy about having to carry a second brand just for AMD. They have ROG motherboards and graphics cards and would like to just keep ROG for everything high-end and high-quality regardless of what's powering it. They will probably end the AREZ line soon now that the program is cancelled.
Copyright is a legal right created by the law of a country that grants the creator of an original work exclusive rights for its use and distribution.
So, let me get this straight. He was selling (violation) copy-written works he'd copied (violation) to disks and distributed (violation) for a use not approved by the author of the work.
He's not allowed to copy anything without written permission, not allowed to sell a copyrighted work without written permission, and also not allowed to distribute a copyrighted work without permission.
No one disputes he was violating copyright law. The judge was sympathetic to what he was trying to do. The only thing people argued about was the value of the disks themselves in how they relate to damages to the copyright author. Microsoft wanted each disk to represent a potential lost license sale (as only they should be distributing restore disks and if people can't burn their own, they will have to buy a new license to have a functioning PC... or buy a new PC with a license), the defense wanted the disks to be worth zero or near zero. They ultimately were decided to be worth something in-between
That's odd. My cable modem runs on Linux. So does my wireless router. Oh, look! Even my Rokus run Linux. Strange how user-friendly each of these interfaces are. Rokus are extremely popular, and so easy to set up, I have family in their mid to late 60s setting them up by themselves with no help from their technically inclined family members.
Linux's failure on the desktop is due to many reasons, though I believe it's mostly due to lack of game support. Most people use their cell phones (Android is king here) for just about everything they need for personal use. Home desktops are mostly dead except for gamers. Average users have laptops or netbooks for things their phones can't do well.
So why is Linux failing in the laptop/netbook arena? Inertia. Chromebooks, Apple, and Microsoft pretty much have the market locked down. There's little incentive for manufacturers to use Linux over ChromeOS or Windows. In a world where people will gladly install spyware for free apps and games, using Linux has to have a selling point other than it being free or even mostly compatible. Ubuntu tried and failed to gain entry into the cell phone, tablet, netbook, and notebook arena. But, the fight isn't over. If/when STEAMOS gets perfected and/or Linux gets decent graphics drivers and game support, it'll finally be competitive on the desktop.
People hardly notice that I have a Linux machine -- because I have Gnome set to look like Windows & I can launch Chrome and check g-mail or watch Netflix or Youtube or Twitch. Most everything I run regularly on my Windows box can be run on my Linux box just as easily -- except games. I hate using WINE, so until gaming is where it should be, I'll be keeping my windows installs.
There's way too many factors for me to judge. I'll wait to see what the Uber tech's say.
As you mentioned, the Uber might have seen her on LIDAR, and hey... she had a bike -- maybe the Uber thought she was riding the bike in her lane and never predicted she might move in front of the UBER. Or, maybe the UBER had a glitch (it happens... that's what the driver is there for.).
The driver certainly wasn't paying as much attention to the road as he/she should have. Some states have laws against distracted driving, and I would hope Uber would want their backup drivers to be alert with both hands on the wheel at all times.
Maybe the driver could have averted this collision if they had been paying more attention and were better prepared to turn the wheel and/or hit the brakes, but we may never know.
As for the pedestrian, some reports have surfaced that she may have been a habitual drug user. If those reports are accurate -- and I don't mean to disparage her in any way -- but, if they are accurate, it's possible she may have been using drugs and may not have been thinking clearly about her decision to cross the multi-lane road that far from a crosswalk with oncoming traffic.
In any case, it's a horrible accident that probably could have been prevented if the two humans involved had been more careful.
I think it would be more important that one prove that any such illegal content can be purged from the network. If files, programs, or data unrelated to the use of the crypto currency as a currency and distributed ledger can be inserted, then there needs to be a way to remove it to prevent further distribution of potentially illegal content.
If any extraneous data cannot be removed, then ban the currency (hopefully merely leading to a fork that is compliant.)
If dangerous top secret information were to be disseminated via Bitcoin blockchain tech, that'd be a serious national security issue & we'd ban it immediately. It's the designer's fault for including a feature without thinking through nefarious uses and a way to isolate the damage and purge the corruption of the system.
In your example, one can at least delete a corrupted file or destroy an encrypted disk. How does one delete this included data from the Bitcoin network without destroying the currency or the transaction network? Maybe it can be done, but I haven't read anything yet on how to purge these unwanted files yet.
You do know that "Nexus" devices weren't manufactured by Google, right? My Nexus 7 (2013 model) was made by ASUS. Just because they slapped the Nexus or Pixel name on someone else's product and put plain stock android on them didn't make them any easier to support. They weren't granted the IP to their internals.
Also, Google has been pretty straightforward about their crappy support. Nexus and Pixel lines at least got pretty immediate upgrades while other brands waited years sometimes to update Android (and they were the lucky ones -- some NEVER got a newer OS!)
I'm hoping Lineage OS takes over where Android drops the ball.... but I've yet to see anything but perpetual betas from them.
I think you misunderstand capitalism. There have always been products that have reached peak innovation and have become ubiquitous, cheap, and offered by many suppliers at prices very near to their cost. They are called commodities.
A great example of commodities are foods in the produce aisle. Sure, people grow and sell specialty cultivars (sometimes even with patents! -- especially the GMOs), but by and large... they're commodities.
Screws, nails, hinges, bolts, nuts, pine wood, and many other things used in construction are commodities.
The cell phone has a long way to go before it becomes a commodity unencumbered by patents, but its product life cycle will eventually be extended -- just like desktop PCs and laptops have gone from 2 year cycles to 3 year cycles... to 5 year and now 7 year cycles or longer. If/when Moore's Law prevents further die shrinks, we'll probably see some architecture changes that will keep things chugging along for a while..... and new battery technologies as well. But, sooner or later, after we've gotten the right architecture on the smallest sized chip with the best possible battery running on the fastest speed (5G or faster), and the patents run out on the hardware and the license restrictions on software are gone -- boom. Cell phone becomes a commodity with little to no change and cheap price.
What drives the market is the exchange of goods and services. People are always going to need things they can't reasonably make/grow for themselves and have time and/or money to trade for those things. Capitalism doesn't live and die by computer/cell phone technology innovations. It's been around since long before computers existed. Plenty of other things to make and improve -- lots of new areas that need innovation as well. But, even if we become hyper advanced to where everything that could be invented has been and we have no new applications for that technology... people will still need stuff & still be willing to work or trade with others for that stuff in exchange for stuff that their trading partners want in return. That's the core of capitalism.
Yep.
MPEG is from the pre-internet era of media. Back when content was purchased on disk, it made sense to have a licensed standard for MPEG, MPEG2, and even MP3. MPEG4 for Blu-Ray was really the last gasp.
Now, everything is streamed online. While Hollywood was fine paying a few cents on the dollar for encryption and compression on disks, streaming media sites are looking to cut costs.
Netflix, Hulu, Google/Youtube, and others are big enough to make their own standards and cut out the MPEG group entirely. They even have different goals as there are different methods to adjust quality over live streams vs a pre-compressed file.
I can't say I'll be sad to see MPEG go -- they were vicious in protecting their licensing and downright bullying in their negotiations, and the lack of alternatives held back progress for years. Now that real alternatives are here, they want to change... ha. good luck w/ that.
I tend to agree. Meltdown had an obvious path to exploit -- run an unauthorized branch of code to access something one shouldn't, then make sure another bit of code read that unauthorized data before it was flagged and wiped. Spectre.... it's just snooping on random processes hoping to find something interesting at the same user-level access.
In a jewelry store theft comparison:
Meltdown -- walk in as a celebrity, ask the jeweler if you can view a specific priceless ring that only celebrities could afford, and then you bolt for the door as soon as the ring is on your finger. You got exactly what you wanted.
Spectre -- walk in, try to grab any ring an average customer is presently inspecting... assuming there are any customers and any of them are viewing any rings during your visit. You have no idea what you're going to get, if anything.... but whatever you DO get, it won't be the specific ring in Meltdown you could have gotten.
No. Apparently, you don't.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Biology is an emergent property of chemistry which is an emergent property of physics.
There are lots of examples of physical properties of materials that are emergent properties.
Emergent behavior and processes are all around us and are studied by actual scientists in various fields specifically created to study emergent behavior -- many with the goal of learning how that behavior emerges from the underlying physics so that one can predict new properties of future materials.
This.
Especially since by using an ISP for government entities, they'd want to ensure that their own ISP would adhere to NN principles not only for themselves, but for citizens and employees throughout the state to be able to access their services with certain reasonable expectations (such as those defined by NN).
The state has a vested interest in ensuring timely, affordable public and employee access to their services unbarred by ISP interference.
holy jumpin' speculation, Batman!
16.04 is an LTS release. Most servers run the LTS version of Ubuntu. So, while your average Joe is fine with upgrading every 6 months, there are a massive number of production servers running an almost two year old LTS about to upgrade to this, and their sysadmin concerns have to be taken into account before this is released. It's going to have to keep them happy for another two years 'til the next release as well.
Ubuntu is smart enough to keep that backwards compatibility upon upgrade or replacement for this specific release for those sysadmins. It's a small concession to leave X.org as the default upon login to keep them happy for the next two years.
I wouldn't be surprised if 16.10 flips the options to make Wayland the default as it wouldn't affect those remaining on LTS & it gives developers more time to shift to Wayland. Most of the programs I use have partial Wayland support, but it's improving -- VLC, Firefox, Chrome/Chromium... and Nvidia is slowly coming around with Wayland compatible drivers. But, it's not there yet -- I wouldn't want Wayland as the default for an LTS version either w/ it's current state. It's not polished, but it's good enough for average users not running production LTS servers.
That's some really good data. Thank you!
Yes, I understand the implications... and I assume the longer the pipeline, the worse the effects. (and the industry has been pushing for ever longer pipelines). But, we're dealing with 4 Ghz chips. Intel's chips have voltage regulators to adjust to load, and most of the time, a consumer's CPU is idling at 5%. If we get say.. a 20% hit for turning off branch speculation completely.... then would that effectively mean the chip would act like a 3.2 Ghz CPU instead of a 4 Ghz CPU? Keeping in mind that those 4 Ghz CPUs largely have an idling speed, a working speed, and a "boost" speed that's above 4 Ghz for certain cores; would Joe/Jane Sixpack who uses his laptop for Facebook, Netflix, Gmail, and Youtube as the majority of his/her computing needs really even notice? Especially with quad cores? And the future systems are coming with hex cores, octa cores, etc.
Branch prediction is great for accelerating program speed, but having multiple cores means more work can be done simultaneously as well (even if not as fast without the branch prediction. I'm just reminded of the single-core days when every program had to fight for CPU time, but now with multi-core and hyperthreading, so many threads can be done at once that maybe speeding things up by branch prediction doesn't have as big of an impact in terms of human interaction as it once did.
Intel has been lowering its CPU speeds as it adds cores to keep the thermal envelope low -- especially in laptops. It's kind of an admission that multi-core is more important than core speed. But, if disabling branching has the same affect on speed as lowering the clock speed on a branch-enabled CPU, then... I just wonder if maybe disabling it altogether for security reasons would be a better path until we can fix the architectural issues. Seems these "garbage patches" are causing instabilities & many systems need a BIOS update to go with a micro-code update... and manufacturers loathe to update any BIOS for systems more than a year or so old.
I have a friend purchasing a 12 core i9 (24 threads) with 32 GB of RAM next month... and I'm just thinking... Would this guy even notice if branch speculation were disabled?!?!? The base frequency is 2.90 GHz, the Turbo is 4.30 GHz. Assuming the biggest hit was 20%, that still gives the Turbo speed of 3.44 Ghz... and the system might spend more time at a higher frequency than the base to offset the performance hit.
Now, I'm not saying we should kill branch prediction in future development, but we should probably re-evaluate how it's done if security is an issue. In the meantime, retpoline seems like a good trade-off & there are other good ideas. I would just like some data on what it would actually do in the "real world" if we shut off the insecure branch prediction completely... because I have a sneaky suspicion that unless one is working on heavily CPU-bound tasks, it wouldn't be noticeable to your average user. CAD workers, video transcoders, AI developers -- sure, they'd opt out b/c of the hit they'd take... but many might just prefer stability over crappy patches & not notice the hit at all.
I would like to see some benchmarks to see exactly what would happen if we killed branch prediction. I bet Intel has a command to turn it off for debugging.
No doubt it'd kill performance, but I'm curious by how much.
For instance, the Raspberry Pi 3's CPU doesn't include any branch prediction at all. It runs at 1.2 Ghz. Different architecture, obviously, but still. If it can chug along pretty good playing h.264 video, run Netflix from Chromium, and do quite a lot of things rather well with a crippled chipset and relatively slow 1.2 Ghz speed (and hobbled RAM, etc)... seems a 4 Ghz Intel chip might not be so bad off without branch prediction.
I have a Core i7 -- quad core, L1, L2, and L3 cache, hyperthreading enabled. CPU rarely hits above 20% -- more often in the 5% to 12% range unless I'm doing video transcoding which makes it hit closer to 80% - 95%. I'd think the lost cycles from a lack of branch prediction would hit transcoding and other CPU-intensive things really hard, but maybe not so much for other random, everyday things.
Eh, maybe, maybe not. I just think it's interesting that the Pi's CPUs (along with some other embedded CPUs) don't use branch prediction at all -- mostly to save power and keep heat down. Clearly the Pi's CPU is no speed demon, but it's "good enough" for a lot of uses. At what point might an Intel CPU without any branch prediction be "good enough?"
Exactly.
Also, it's a bit unfair to break out the "desktop" as being just a tower system when there are all-in-one PCs and laptops with docking stations that have all the peripherals of a PC. I've worked several places where everyone had a laptop on a dock and would then take their laptop home if they needed to do more work via VPN. For the user, the difference between a docked laptop and a tower were slim to none while at work. Even with the internals of a "desktop," we're starting to see new form factors for parts for PCIe and SATA that could fit inside a laptop. The lines are blurring.
I've got a laptop, a desktop, and a tablet (Nexus 7 2013). That desktop is about 11 years old, but it still plays Netflix, Youtube, and other streaming media just fine. I'm about to replace it with a new gaming PC because while my 4-5 year old gaming laptop can play most games just fine, I want to also stream the games on Twitch and/or do other things in the background while gaming plus have my laptop up for other things. (plus, it'd be nice to have a 6+ core PC for video transcoding).
I'm atypical -- most people I know have a 5 to 8 year old laptop and a cell phone. (I just use my tablet and have an ancient flip phone b/c I like the battery life and lower monthly fees).
So, yeah... the "desktop" is dead in the sense that all but power users moved to laptops with multiple monitors and the same peripherals as their old desktops. I even know gamers that use just a laptop. But mostly, the life cycle of the devices just lengthened because there is no killer application to motivate people to buy a newer one. I doubt VR will be that killer ap -- maybe AI.
Unless you're in CAD/design/animation/special effects/video encoding, etc... laptops are fine... and even the monstrous tower PCs are good for a decade unless time is an important factor. Even some of those high-end jobs can be offloaded to a supercomputer / "cloud".
considering what little CPU percentage is used by the average PC user, there may be an argument for desktops and laptops not needing it either.... Maybe even for data centers where large caches are more important than branch predictions.
I know, I know... Insanity! Branch prediction is like... 75% to 99% correct, so it's not that much of a waste... and pipelines are long... but, Intel just helped put out a patch that wipes cache when switching between user mode and kernel mode and your average user can't tell their machine is 5% to 20% slower... b/c their quad core CPU is idling below 10% anyway.
The trend lately is towards low power chips for users at all levels -- even data centers... and trending towards mobility for users. Phones, tablets, chromebooks, laptops that are basically tablets, etc.
If I have to decide between a fat cache that doesn't get flushed in the name of security vs speculative processing... for whatever spectre or related exploit may be around the corner, I think I might rather have the cache. If every time a file server randomly accesses a database, their entire cache is flushed to protect against a bug... I could see where turning off branch prediction if possible might be a better solution than flushing the cache. A cache miss can be huge -- many orders of magnitude longer than waiting several cycles to execute something that wasn't predicted, but was pre-fetched at least.
False. Out of order execution alone isn't enough. Spectre was NAMED after "speculation" -- branch prediction. The ARM core in the Raspberry Pi DOES NOT USE THIS.
Read the section for Spectre here:
http://www.pcgamer.com/what-yo...
Meltdown affects ONLY Intel because they allowed a special type of branch prediction for illegal operations, Spectre affects many CPUs that use branch prediction, but is much more difficult to exploit as each exploit would have to target a specific cpu or cpu family -- not a generic exploit that would work on nearly every Intel CPU since the mid 90s.
Many CPUs use branch prediction in order to gain some performance when they guess correctly, but that's at the cost of using more power and the risk of wasting that power on bad guesses -- which is why some ARM chips (like the one Pi uses) avoid it completely.
Eh, ymmv. Mint is more focused on providing a very stable, very polished experience. It does not necessarily update when Ubuntu updates. You could think of Mint as being a kind of Ubuntu LTS release. In fact, the next Mint will be based on an Ubuntu LTS release. So, if you have newer hardware, you may want Ubuntu instead for a newer kernel and better driver support (along with newer versions of your fav. software). I personally prefer Ubuntu because it is more cutting edge with Nvidia drivers, Wayland support, and newer Kernels. I have used Mint in the past on older hardware, and it was beautiful. Now I use Ubuntu with Cinnamon -- though you should know that Cinnamon on Ubuntu doesn't have the polish or all the features of Cinnamon on Mint. So, I sometimes boot to Gnome on Ubuntu -- mostly to test out Wayland support.
As for Cinnamon vs Mate -- you're really comparing a Gnome 3 fork to a Gnome 2 fork. Cinnamon has more features, but takes up more resources. I'd prefer Cinnamon -- but on older, slower machines with limited RAM, Mate is pretty darned nice. I also keep Mate installed just in case I have an issue with another DE.
I like to test bleeding edge development builds of Ubuntu, so I get my fair share of bugs & so it's great to have a backup DE like Mate to switch to if a bug won't let me load into Gnome or Cinnamon.
Notes on Cinnamon -- before Cinnamon 3.2, it was really buggy and crashed often on multiple systems I had it on. It used to leak memory like crazy and have to be re-started... but after 3.4, it was rock solid and gorgeous. I think it's up to 3.7 now.
Notes on Mint -- I had an issue where I couldn't enable Zram a couple years back b/c it wasn't supported on the kernel that came with Mint -- or any that were in the Mint repo. So, I installed a newer kernel... I think 3.14 manually... got that working properly. Then, I had an issue with VLC playing a x.264 file that a newer version of VLC fixed... but, I had to manually install the newer VLC b/c it wasn't in Mint's repo. Same thing for a driver issue... Eventually, I had SO MANY bits of software that I was updating manually for compatibility reasons (like having the same versions of LibreOffice as another machine, etc.), that I ended up adding the entire Ubuntu current repository to Mint... which merged Mint with Ubuntu -- and that worked for a bit... until I got some nasty dependency issues as my hybrid Franken-Mint-Ubuntu had issues with some updates and changes. Ended up wiping it and just installing Ubuntu with Cinnamon since obviously I couldn't live with plain vanilla Mint.
You may have no issues at all for what Mint has to offer -- especially since it's caught up to Ubuntu for the next release... but, as things drift, you may change your mind. Depends on whether you're an LTS kinda person or a twice yearly release kinda person -- or like me... a twice yearly on some things, rolling release or development on others.
AMD checks privileges before it runs the code. Intel chose to optimize their branch prediction in a way that checked the privileges AFTER the code was run, but before it was written/applied. This allowed a small window for someone to read the results of that illegal instruction before it was dumped for being flagged as an exception.
I've read some info that speculates that Intel likely gained some performance by letting a lot of branch predictions run and then dumping those that are flagged after the fact instead of checking each and every one before it was run (because a lot of branches are dumped anyway for other reasons, so small price to pay to let things run and be wrong.) I don't know for sure, though. Sounds to me like they skimped on some silicon to check in hardware and put more into branch prediction.
Basically the code runs like this:
Hi, I'm a user program with user rights. I'd like to know where the super secret memory address of this part of the system is so I can read from it... and maybe even write to it later with a different exploit.
AMD: No, you're in user land, you can't see kernel land.
end of story
Intel: Oh, let me fetch that for you... Here, I've typed up a handy map of things and notes on your way around the super-secret areas... just show me your security clearance first before I hand it over.
Your malware: *glances at map, notes*
Intel: WAIT... you're in user land. You can't have this. *lights the map and notes on fire after you've already seen them*
More like... the monorail has to do something useful. When I stayed there not long after the monorail opened, it was difficult to find and it took longer to walk to the monorail itself and then to my destination than to just walk to my destination anyway. I stayed at Bally's. I could walk anywhere I wanted to go -- the sidewalks are wide in Vegas, the streets have crosswalks that go over and above the streets. The strip is really designed for walking -- plus, the entrances are beautiful and facing the street.
The track is 4 miles long, it's hidden a block over from the boulevard.... behind the huge hotel/casinos on one side of the strip. I checked Google Maps & it's over 1,000 ft from the entrances of most of the hotels -- sometimes double that.
Here's the stations:
SLS, Westgate, Las Vegas Convention Center, Harrah's / The Linq, Flamingo/Caesars Palace, Bally's / Paris Las Vegas, MGM Grand
Now note -- this is only a 4 mile strip and only on one side of the street. It feels like you're in a back alley going to find this monorail. Beyond that, there's really only a few of these I'd care to visit anyway -- Bally's, Paris, Ceasar's, and MGM Grand. Those are all pretty close to one another, so no idea why I'd want to walk over 1000 ft to a monorail just to walk 1000 ft again to the entrance of one of those destinations. Also... it being on only one side of the street, to get to say.. Luxor from Bally's, it'd be 1000 ft to the station, a fee, a wait time, then 1000ft from MGM Grand station to the boulevard, then I'd cross the street and walk some more to get to Luxor. If it actually went from Bally's to Luxor, it might possibly be worth it, but I could take a taxi if I didn't feel like walking that far anyway.
The monorail doesn't even connect to the international airport! You'd think if I flew into Las Vegas's McCarran International Airport, I'd be tempted to buy a monorail ticket if it meant I could load my luggage on and be ferried to my hotel.
I've been on public transportation that was useful. Atlanta's MARTA is awesome. How Vegas screwed this up, I don't know... but it's like a monorail to nowhere for people that want to travel just to get to and from the monorail system.
There is no law requiring businesses to take payments in cash. Even businesses that choose to take cash can refuse to take certain coins or bills. Ever seen a sign that says "exact change only" or a "No bills larger than a $10 accepted?"
Governments must accept cash, but businesses can do what they like. They could charge you in jelly beans if they wish. If you take their goods or services without paying them in the agreed/posted amount of jelly beans, then you'd be guilty of theft or theft of services. That could land you in civil court if it were a contract payment -- say you were to pay 5,000 jellybeans per month and suddenly stopped shipments. In that case, they'd sue, and then a judge would either compel you to produce the required jellybeans or a cash equivalent. If you simply took an item without payment in jellybeans, you'd likely be arrested and taken to criminal court then have to return the stolen items or make restitution for stolen services in either jellybeans or cash.... plus additional fines, jail time, etc.
This isn't some undefined area of law that hasn't been explored. Physical US bills and coins are legal tender for state and federal governments. There is zero legislation compelling businesses to use them. There are businesses in the USA that do business using strips of precious metals -- because they have lost faith in US currency. There are businesses that exclusively use tokens -- like casinos in Vegas that use them for gambling. There are some businesses that exclusively barter for items and have no cash involved whatsoever!
Credit cards, Debit cards, pre-loaded cards, and gift cards aren't radically different than tokens. Anyone can go to WalMart and buy a pre-loaded VISA or Mastercard without having to have a bank account, much less good credit. You can argue that they're discriminatory all you like, but not only is it a poor argument to make, there's no legal standing for disallowing such discrimination. One can't discriminate based on race, sex, religion, and many other factors for most for-profit entities, but there's no law against discriminating against poor people. There's no law against discriminating based upon credit rating either.
Frankly, most online businesses already require a credit card of some sort & the few that don't require a checking account instead. (A few rare businesses will take a cashier's check or a moneygram, but hey... may as well get a pre-loaded card if you're going to go through that trouble!) No online business takes cash through the mail, and most don't have a physical presence where you could take cash if you wanted to.
So, yeah, I personally think it sucks that fewer places are taking cash, but it's not illegal. Never was -- won't be no matter how much you hold your breath, turn blue, and act like Donald Trump by doubling down on something when you're wrong.