Because not all life is killed by the direct effects. Some is killed because it can't handle the high oxygen content. Then, the high oxygen content will cause fires. With enough combustable material, these may continue to burn until there's then not enough oxygen left for the remaining life (which has adapted for a very high oxygen content in the atmosphere to avoid dying out already) to survive.
So don't buy them. I stopped buying games for quite a few years because I wasn't willing to put up with the DRM that they included. I realised that if I pirated them, then I'd talk about them, which might lead other people to buy them, and so I'd be supporting the publishers, albeit indirectly.
Then gog.com launched and now I have bought a load more games than I have time to play. I can download a stand-alone installer for any of them, which I can back up and install on any computer that I own without needing an Internet connection. There's simply no excuse for pirating games these days.
You're right, though I think that focussing on smelting iron is misleading. If that were the only limitation, then the industrial revolution would just have happened over a longer timescale. It's interesting that you bring up the Tudors, as charcoal production in the 16th century for iron smelting led to laws being passed to prevent deforestation in the UK, so it was possible to produce relatively large quantities of iron with only wood as the energy source.
Steam engines were the big consumers of coal. You can run steam engines on wood, but the density isn't high enough for it to be worthwhile - you quickly spend far more energy moving the fuel around than you get to do useful work. Again, producing charcoal near the forests would have helped with this, but would likely not have produced enough to justify railways, so you'd have ended up with charcoal-powered stationary steam engines fed by charcoal delivered by horse-drawn canal boats.
Perhaps more interesting is Aluminium. A number of sets of crown jewels contain small aluminium objects because it was one of the rarest metals given the huge energy cost in smelting. It would be completely impossible to produce the kinds of quantities of aluminium needed for most late 20th century technology without something far more energy-dense than wood.
That said, a civilisation evolving under such constraints might go straight to electricity generation from other sources. Copper is relatively easy to smelt (easier than iron and quite possible using wood without producing charcoal first), so wires for transmission and winding generator coils would have been possible. Wind turbines are easy to produce given copper wire and some wood and canvas. It seems backwards to us, but it isn't completely implausible.
In fact, looking at when the battery and steam engine were both first invented, it seems quite odd that our industrial revolution followed the timescale and path that it did. It took a lot of changes in attitudes as well as energy availability. Remember that Babbage and Watt's lives overlapped by 30 years, yet Babbage's engines were largely regarded as interesting experiments rather than useful machines (other than using the simpler designs for producing more accurate artillery tables).
I think that you're contradicting yourself. The Earth has been around for 4.5 billion years, so for an alien life form to have been around for that long would require only that it reached intelligence a billion years earlier than us, or when Earth was 3.5 billion years old. Multicellular life had been around on Earth for a while then. And that's assuming that their planet cooled at the same time as ours - Sol isn't one of the oldest second-generation stars.
Not in its raw form, however you can make charcoal from wood (burn it with insufficient oxygen) and then use that to smelt iron. The requirement is concentration of energy, but once you have one energy source then eventually you can concentrate it. You can smelt iron in a solar furnace too, though you need to make a lot of glass to a fairly high standard to do it.
IMO we could well be the only one surrounded by planets full of the equivalents of bacteria and jellyfish but little more.
The point of TFA is that this is unlikely. Without photosynthesis, early life here would have experienced a run-away greenhouse effect and died out. Without the right balance after photosynthesis evolved, the oxygen content of the air would have become high enough to kill off all life. The climate of a planet that is capable of supporting live (enough free energy for evolution, not so much that complex molecules break down) is an unstable equilibrium and it's very easy to push it over the edge into one or other extreme.
I'm not convinced. Trump is an egomaniac who would likely spend most of his term fighting with congress and failing to get anything done. Hillary is a corrupt establishment authoritarian who knows the system well enough to actually achieve things (though things that are good for the people are not very high on her to-do list). I think I'd prefer that the US had an inept clown as President than someone who is effective but actively malicious.
In the UK, you can buy insurance to cover against this kind of problem, with rates that depend on what your solicitor thinks are your chances of winning. You pay the premium up front and include it in the damages that you seek. If you win, it's just part of your winnings. If you lose, the insurance pays both sides their costs and refunds the premium. This doesn't help if your solicitor doesn't think that you have a chance of winning, but generally solicitors are over optimistic about your chances, so if your own solicitor thinks that you don't have a case then you probably don't.
With your example, however, you'd go to the small claims court. The small claims court usually doesn't award costs to either party, and if you're suing someone who has that much money then it's probably cheaper for them not to bother showing up and to just pay whatever the court awards. You generally represent yourself in small claims (magistrates tend not to look to favourably on excess legalese in these cases), so the cost to you is a few hours of your time to turn up.
If you think that the kind of volatility that causes a 25% fluctuation in value (up or down) is a good thing for a currency, then I can only assume that you've never tried to buy or sell anything.
Is post-Google Android any good? Brain-dead security model, user-hostile permissions system, no sane update infrastructure. The only positive thing is that it allows Google, the handset makers, and the carriers to all blame each other so no one actually has to take responsibility for it.
I agree with a lot of those, but few of them need any wide-area connectivity. The smoke and burglar alarms are a good one, but they're also likely better handled by a more reliable back-haul than a consumer broadband connection. Smart electricity meters can get the spot price via a broadcast (some systems broadcast it over the power lines, as the bandwidth required is tiny) and relay it locally without needing an Internet connection. As the other poster said, with LED lighting the power consumption is so low that you're likely to be burning more power in the processor and sensors figuring out whether the lights should be on than you are from having the light on.
The problem is diminishing returns. For a couple of years, our flat had no thermostat, just an on-off timer for the heating. That was very wasteful (and resulted in the house being too hot or too cold a lot of the time). Then we got a programmable thermostat and now it's comfortable most of the time. When I work from home on a winter day, I need to flip a switch to tell it not to cool off, but that's about it.
We waste a bit on heating when we're out in an evening, but the energy cost of heating a modern house or flat is a lot more than the cost of keeping it warm, so it turns out not to be very much - telling the thermostat to keep the house warm for an extra hour in the evening added a negligible amount to our gas bill over the course of the year as the boiler only comes on briefly to keep the radiators slightly warmer than room temperature.
At $250, it would be a long time before something like Nest would save me any money (especially if you factor in opportunity cost - for most people spending that money on better insulation would save more a lot faster) and a tiny saving is not worth having my central heating connected to the Internet and dependent on software sufficiently complex that it's absolutely guaranteed to have remotely exploitable security holes.
It depends a bit on your usage model. If it's primarily online, but wants to tolerate network disruptions, then that's fine. Native apps are most useful for mostly-offline use, for example a news app that grabs a load of data when I'm on WiFi and then lets me read the articles when I'm not. I don't (even on my laptop) want to have to have a tab open for everything that I might want to use offline.
It doesn't matter. The dummy calculations add noise. You can filter it out by taking more samples (this is a well-known countermeasure in the side-channel literature). The attack is already designed to work with a noisy source, the defence just makes it more noisy.
This kind of defence (and, indeed, the masking described in TFS) don't normally work against this kind of side-channel attack. They increase the noise, but there's still signal. All that they do is drive up the number of samples that you need to be able to run the analysis. If you're lucky, then the number of samples that they need is more than the number of samples that they can record in the available time, but for long-lived keys this can be a very long time. It's also worth noting that with this kind of thing you don't need to recover the entire key - if you have the public key, then you can quickly verify whether a guess at the private key is correct. Over time, as you record the samples, you gain a greater probability of each bit being 0 or 1. You run a directed brute force attack, with the bits with the least confidence being flipped more frequently.
I honestly think Facetwat is a front for the NSA / FBI. Call be paranoid, call me whack-job
I'll just call you ignorant. A lot of Facebook's funding came from the CIA. In contrast, the NSA and Google have a revolving door for new hires. Look up inter-agency rivalry some time.
On the 20the anniversary of Apple's famous 'why 1984 won't be like 1984 ad', they released a new iMac that had an iSight camera built in. I found the irony very entertaining.
That's what most people do anyway. The only people who upgrade piecemeal are geeks like us and even then most of us don't bother
I'd say that monitors, keyboards, and mice are probably the exceptions to these. That was part of the motivation for the Mac Mini - most people already have the peripherals and so can plug in a computer. Generally, monitors are upgraded less frequently than computers and a faster GPU is one of the main reasons for upgrading the computer, now that CPU speeds have plateaued.
Thunderbolt can, among other things, encapsulate PCIe. You effectively end up with a discrete GPU that has slightly higher latency than the attached one, but all of the rendering is done on the GPU and the final image is output directly to the display. You'll upload textures, geometry, and shaders to the external GPU via Thunderbolt, but you won't be streaming rendered images over the connection.
This isn't a very surprising development. At least one third-party has been providing external GPUs for Macs since shortly after they started shipping with Thunderbolt (you can also buy a simple PCIe enclosure that plugs into Thunderbolt and lets you plug in other cards). Moving the GPU into the display (which, in an Apple monitor, already uses the PCIe parts of Thunderbolt to provide USB, Firewire 800, Gigabit Ethernet, audio, and a camera) is a pretty logical step and one that several people had predicted.
Toshiba was producing 8086 laptops with two 3.5" floppy drives (no hard disk) in the '80s. Luggables were still made into the '90s (largely because until TFTs arrived, getting a decent display was difficult, with very slow refresh rates, colour an expensive option, and lots of ghosting).
Microsoft BASIC ran on a lot of different architectures, including several that had larger address spaces. The 64KB limit pervaded the code and was independent of the target.
"640K ought to be enough for anybody." - Bill Gates, 1981
Do you have a source for this? I remember it being repeated a lot in the '90s, but in the '80s I remember the quote being that 64KB ought to be enough for anyone, in relation to a hard limit imposed by Microsoft BASIC. This version makes more sense, as 640KB was an Intel limitation - the 64KB limit came from code written by Gates himself.
Nokia dumb phones were still selling very well before that microsoft plant stepped into the ceo position.
Nokia dumb phones were in a shrinking market and had a razor thin profit margin. They existed primarily to build the Nokia brand and get people to buy Nokia smartphones, which wasn't working. Nokia had been making year-on-year losses for several years before Elop took over. Prior to that, they'd identified that their existing platform (Series 60) had problems (it had a nice modern kernel design and a userland crippled by being heavily optimised for devices with under 1MB of RAM). Their solution to this was to replace the kernel with Linux and have half a dozen teams compete internally to provide the userland. These teams spent more time sabotaging each other than producing something decent that they might ship. By the time that they had something vaguely plausible, there was no buy in from third-party app developers.
They might possibly have succeeded in making Android handsets, but given that only one company is making any profit doing that (and no one was when they made the decision not to), it wasn't an obvious call.
Not sure about the case here, but it's fairly common for rental law to give the landlords the right to evict tenants with something like 30 days notice, even on a fixed-term contract. If they're on a rolling contract then effectively they're renewing the same contract each month. In both cases, you're not really changing the contract, you're simply making the old one unavailable and requiring that they either sign the new one or find somewhere else to live at the end of the 30 day period.
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Because not all life is killed by the direct effects. Some is killed because it can't handle the high oxygen content. Then, the high oxygen content will cause fires. With enough combustable material, these may continue to burn until there's then not enough oxygen left for the remaining life (which has adapted for a very high oxygen content in the atmosphere to avoid dying out already) to survive.
Then gog.com launched and now I have bought a load more games than I have time to play. I can download a stand-alone installer for any of them, which I can back up and install on any computer that I own without needing an Internet connection. There's simply no excuse for pirating games these days.
Except by that measure, we too are fantastically unlikely.
Who's to say that we're not? Just because something happens once, doesn't mean that it's not unlikely. See the anthropic principle.
You're right, though I think that focussing on smelting iron is misleading. If that were the only limitation, then the industrial revolution would just have happened over a longer timescale. It's interesting that you bring up the Tudors, as charcoal production in the 16th century for iron smelting led to laws being passed to prevent deforestation in the UK, so it was possible to produce relatively large quantities of iron with only wood as the energy source.
Steam engines were the big consumers of coal. You can run steam engines on wood, but the density isn't high enough for it to be worthwhile - you quickly spend far more energy moving the fuel around than you get to do useful work. Again, producing charcoal near the forests would have helped with this, but would likely not have produced enough to justify railways, so you'd have ended up with charcoal-powered stationary steam engines fed by charcoal delivered by horse-drawn canal boats.
Perhaps more interesting is Aluminium. A number of sets of crown jewels contain small aluminium objects because it was one of the rarest metals given the huge energy cost in smelting. It would be completely impossible to produce the kinds of quantities of aluminium needed for most late 20th century technology without something far more energy-dense than wood.
That said, a civilisation evolving under such constraints might go straight to electricity generation from other sources. Copper is relatively easy to smelt (easier than iron and quite possible using wood without producing charcoal first), so wires for transmission and winding generator coils would have been possible. Wind turbines are easy to produce given copper wire and some wood and canvas. It seems backwards to us, but it isn't completely implausible.
In fact, looking at when the battery and steam engine were both first invented, it seems quite odd that our industrial revolution followed the timescale and path that it did. It took a lot of changes in attitudes as well as energy availability. Remember that Babbage and Watt's lives overlapped by 30 years, yet Babbage's engines were largely regarded as interesting experiments rather than useful machines (other than using the simpler designs for producing more accurate artillery tables).
I think that you're contradicting yourself. The Earth has been around for 4.5 billion years, so for an alien life form to have been around for that long would require only that it reached intelligence a billion years earlier than us, or when Earth was 3.5 billion years old. Multicellular life had been around on Earth for a while then. And that's assuming that their planet cooled at the same time as ours - Sol isn't one of the oldest second-generation stars.
You can't melt iron with wood fires
Not in its raw form, however you can make charcoal from wood (burn it with insufficient oxygen) and then use that to smelt iron. The requirement is concentration of energy, but once you have one energy source then eventually you can concentrate it. You can smelt iron in a solar furnace too, though you need to make a lot of glass to a fairly high standard to do it.
IMO we could well be the only one surrounded by planets full of the equivalents of bacteria and jellyfish but little more.
The point of TFA is that this is unlikely. Without photosynthesis, early life here would have experienced a run-away greenhouse effect and died out. Without the right balance after photosynthesis evolved, the oxygen content of the air would have become high enough to kill off all life. The climate of a planet that is capable of supporting live (enough free energy for evolution, not so much that complex molecules break down) is an unstable equilibrium and it's very easy to push it over the edge into one or other extreme.
I'm not convinced. Trump is an egomaniac who would likely spend most of his term fighting with congress and failing to get anything done. Hillary is a corrupt establishment authoritarian who knows the system well enough to actually achieve things (though things that are good for the people are not very high on her to-do list). I think I'd prefer that the US had an inept clown as President than someone who is effective but actively malicious.
In the UK, you can buy insurance to cover against this kind of problem, with rates that depend on what your solicitor thinks are your chances of winning. You pay the premium up front and include it in the damages that you seek. If you win, it's just part of your winnings. If you lose, the insurance pays both sides their costs and refunds the premium. This doesn't help if your solicitor doesn't think that you have a chance of winning, but generally solicitors are over optimistic about your chances, so if your own solicitor thinks that you don't have a case then you probably don't.
With your example, however, you'd go to the small claims court. The small claims court usually doesn't award costs to either party, and if you're suing someone who has that much money then it's probably cheaper for them not to bother showing up and to just pay whatever the court awards. You generally represent yourself in small claims (magistrates tend not to look to favourably on excess legalese in these cases), so the cost to you is a few hours of your time to turn up.
If you think that the kind of volatility that causes a 25% fluctuation in value (up or down) is a good thing for a currency, then I can only assume that you've never tried to buy or sell anything.
Is post-Google Android any good? Brain-dead security model, user-hostile permissions system, no sane update infrastructure. The only positive thing is that it allows Google, the handset makers, and the carriers to all blame each other so no one actually has to take responsibility for it.
I agree with a lot of those, but few of them need any wide-area connectivity. The smoke and burglar alarms are a good one, but they're also likely better handled by a more reliable back-haul than a consumer broadband connection. Smart electricity meters can get the spot price via a broadcast (some systems broadcast it over the power lines, as the bandwidth required is tiny) and relay it locally without needing an Internet connection. As the other poster said, with LED lighting the power consumption is so low that you're likely to be burning more power in the processor and sensors figuring out whether the lights should be on than you are from having the light on.
The problem is diminishing returns. For a couple of years, our flat had no thermostat, just an on-off timer for the heating. That was very wasteful (and resulted in the house being too hot or too cold a lot of the time). Then we got a programmable thermostat and now it's comfortable most of the time. When I work from home on a winter day, I need to flip a switch to tell it not to cool off, but that's about it.
We waste a bit on heating when we're out in an evening, but the energy cost of heating a modern house or flat is a lot more than the cost of keeping it warm, so it turns out not to be very much - telling the thermostat to keep the house warm for an extra hour in the evening added a negligible amount to our gas bill over the course of the year as the boiler only comes on briefly to keep the radiators slightly warmer than room temperature.
At $250, it would be a long time before something like Nest would save me any money (especially if you factor in opportunity cost - for most people spending that money on better insulation would save more a lot faster) and a tiny saving is not worth having my central heating connected to the Internet and dependent on software sufficiently complex that it's absolutely guaranteed to have remotely exploitable security holes.
It depends a bit on your usage model. If it's primarily online, but wants to tolerate network disruptions, then that's fine. Native apps are most useful for mostly-offline use, for example a news app that grabs a load of data when I'm on WiFi and then lets me read the articles when I'm not. I don't (even on my laptop) want to have to have a tab open for everything that I might want to use offline.
It doesn't matter. The dummy calculations add noise. You can filter it out by taking more samples (this is a well-known countermeasure in the side-channel literature). The attack is already designed to work with a noisy source, the defence just makes it more noisy.
This kind of defence (and, indeed, the masking described in TFS) don't normally work against this kind of side-channel attack. They increase the noise, but there's still signal. All that they do is drive up the number of samples that you need to be able to run the analysis. If you're lucky, then the number of samples that they need is more than the number of samples that they can record in the available time, but for long-lived keys this can be a very long time. It's also worth noting that with this kind of thing you don't need to recover the entire key - if you have the public key, then you can quickly verify whether a guess at the private key is correct. Over time, as you record the samples, you gain a greater probability of each bit being 0 or 1. You run a directed brute force attack, with the bits with the least confidence being flipped more frequently.
I honestly think Facetwat is a front for the NSA / FBI. Call be paranoid, call me whack-job
I'll just call you ignorant. A lot of Facebook's funding came from the CIA. In contrast, the NSA and Google have a revolving door for new hires. Look up inter-agency rivalry some time.
On the 20the anniversary of Apple's famous 'why 1984 won't be like 1984 ad', they released a new iMac that had an iSight camera built in. I found the irony very entertaining.
That's what most people do anyway. The only people who upgrade piecemeal are geeks like us and even then most of us don't bother
I'd say that monitors, keyboards, and mice are probably the exceptions to these. That was part of the motivation for the Mac Mini - most people already have the peripherals and so can plug in a computer. Generally, monitors are upgraded less frequently than computers and a faster GPU is one of the main reasons for upgrading the computer, now that CPU speeds have plateaued.
Thunderbolt can, among other things, encapsulate PCIe. You effectively end up with a discrete GPU that has slightly higher latency than the attached one, but all of the rendering is done on the GPU and the final image is output directly to the display. You'll upload textures, geometry, and shaders to the external GPU via Thunderbolt, but you won't be streaming rendered images over the connection.
This isn't a very surprising development. At least one third-party has been providing external GPUs for Macs since shortly after they started shipping with Thunderbolt (you can also buy a simple PCIe enclosure that plugs into Thunderbolt and lets you plug in other cards). Moving the GPU into the display (which, in an Apple monitor, already uses the PCIe parts of Thunderbolt to provide USB, Firewire 800, Gigabit Ethernet, audio, and a camera) is a pretty logical step and one that several people had predicted.
Toshiba was producing 8086 laptops with two 3.5" floppy drives (no hard disk) in the '80s. Luggables were still made into the '90s (largely because until TFTs arrived, getting a decent display was difficult, with very slow refresh rates, colour an expensive option, and lots of ghosting).
Microsoft BASIC ran on a lot of different architectures, including several that had larger address spaces. The 64KB limit pervaded the code and was independent of the target.
IoT - imagine all the stuff in the world that works suddenly became as easy to use and dependable as your printer.
"640K ought to be enough for anybody." - Bill Gates, 1981
Do you have a source for this? I remember it being repeated a lot in the '90s, but in the '80s I remember the quote being that 64KB ought to be enough for anyone, in relation to a hard limit imposed by Microsoft BASIC. This version makes more sense, as 640KB was an Intel limitation - the 64KB limit came from code written by Gates himself.
Nokia dumb phones were still selling very well before that microsoft plant stepped into the ceo position.
Nokia dumb phones were in a shrinking market and had a razor thin profit margin. They existed primarily to build the Nokia brand and get people to buy Nokia smartphones, which wasn't working. Nokia had been making year-on-year losses for several years before Elop took over. Prior to that, they'd identified that their existing platform (Series 60) had problems (it had a nice modern kernel design and a userland crippled by being heavily optimised for devices with under 1MB of RAM). Their solution to this was to replace the kernel with Linux and have half a dozen teams compete internally to provide the userland. These teams spent more time sabotaging each other than producing something decent that they might ship. By the time that they had something vaguely plausible, there was no buy in from third-party app developers.
They might possibly have succeeded in making Android handsets, but given that only one company is making any profit doing that (and no one was when they made the decision not to), it wasn't an obvious call.
Not sure about the case here, but it's fairly common for rental law to give the landlords the right to evict tenants with something like 30 days notice, even on a fixed-term contract. If they're on a rolling contract then effectively they're renewing the same contract each month. In both cases, you're not really changing the contract, you're simply making the old one unavailable and requiring that they either sign the new one or find somewhere else to live at the end of the 30 day period.