It doesn't even really matter at this point. Let's be honest... the average computer user doesn't know the difference between U2-Somesong.mp3 and U2-SomeSong.exe.
To make matters worse, some attacks may even occur if you are dealing with safe file types, like a PNG or even PDF. Some security problems exist due to the user's ignorance or idiocy but "some" isn't exactly the same thing as "all".
It's not but NATO, through their cold war era war games, acknowledged that they were the first ones to deploy nuclear weapons in an open conflict with the soviet union. If I recall correctly, NATO's tactics included, as one of the very first actions, nuking the hell out of (or into?) the Volga river to hinder the soviet tank advance.
With the US pressuring every nation to stay the hell away from Cuba, the fact that Canada decided to ignore the US's diplomatic pressure and become a strong trade partner of Cuba is nothing shy of "treating them like a NATO member".
yes, programs do indirectly control how many cores they use.
Wrong. You still don't get it, do you? A program simply does not have the capability to state how many cores it will use. No matter how many times you repeat yourself, a program does not nor can it ever "use cores". The only thing that a program is capable of doing is defining what portions of the code may run parallel. That's all. The rest of the job is up to the operating system which, as it may surprise you, is the sole responsible of managing the system's resources, including CPU time.
(...snipped nonsense...)
And like I said, nobody programmed their programs to split the processing into three parts, only 1, 2, or 4.
Wrong again. What you said doesn't make any sense at all and reveals a deep ignorance on the subject. See, it also wouldn't make any sense to state that a certain operating system could only run a "power of two" number of processes at any given time. So exactly why would it make any sense to state that you could only design applications so that they could only run power of two number of processes/threads? The mechanism that executes the application's threads/processes is the exact same mechanism that executes all the independent processes. Don't you even realize that? Moreover, there isn't a single parallelization interface that forces a programmer to only specify a power of two number of processes/threads. Anyone can run fork() as many times they wish, as pthreads_create() can run as many times you need. Heck, did you ever heard of the make utility? Do you happen to know that it has a nifty little option which enables the user to specify the number of jobs it runs parallel? For example, do you understand what make --jobs=3 does? And what about make --jobs=7? I bet it blew your mind.
And by the way, how often does more than one process running on your computer at any given time use up a significant amount of processor resources? Yeah, almost never. Most of them sit there idle.
Just because your ignorance is forcing you to make stuff along about parallel computing it doesn't mean you need to imagine what's the system load of some random person's computer which is located somewhere across the globe. You only end up looking sillier.
Processes cannot control their own processor affinity, at least not when running on those operating systems (and countless others). What the processes (and, through other mecanisms, also the users) are able to do is hint the operating system to run a certain process on a certain processor. The operating system takes those hints in condideration but it isn't forced to obey those hints.
You've just demonstrated that you don't have a clue about how an application is ran, let alone how an operating system manages the running processes. For starters, you keep on blabbering about "programs handling cores". That does not have any basis on reality, as the only "program" that can be stated that handles "cores" is the operating system. That's all. The remaining programs that the operating system executes may spawn processes and may be multi-threaded but they do not nor they can handle "cores". At all.
Moreover, even if a certain program, running on a 4-core system, generates 4 processes or threads, you still cannot claim that that particular program "handles 4 cores". It is up to the operating system to manage the system's resources, including where and how a process is ran. It might even run all the 4 processes or threads in the same core.
Another silly thing that you imply which is clearly wrong is that a user can only take advantage of the multiple cores in a system if that user happens to run applications which spawn as many processes or threads as the number of cores. That is just plain wrong. The operating system manages the execution of all the system's processes and threads, which means that it distributes the execution of those processes and threads through all the available processing cores. So, if you run 4 separate applications (single-process/threaded) on a decent operating system running on a 4 processing core system then the operating system may end up executing those 4 separate applications in the 4 separate processing cores. As any desktop computer is running at any given time more than 20 different processes (single or multi-threaded) then the advantage of having more processing cores on your system is rather obvious.
But hey, don't let logic and concrete knowledge on the issue get in the way of your judgement.
You are being rather silly here. It's one thing for a corporation to offer vague promises in the form of a glorified press release. Having those promises being enforced by law is a whole different thing. How many times have corporations swore to something (Google's "don't do evil", Apple's "laptops should not be used on laps", Microsoft's "we take standards very seriously/ security is our prime objective", etc...) to then see them blatantly breaking their promise?
I've been browsing Microsoft's study and there is quite a bit of silliness in it. It doesn't mention anywhere, regarding the non-microsoft OSs, what vulnerabilities were counted and what was the source of those reports. It only mentions, regarding linux distributions, that he manually left out OpenOffice and the GIMP. No more no less. Following that, I searched for what the study mentions quite a bit (Red Hat/Ubuntu's security advisories) and this was what I found:
Browsing those, the first thing that pops out is that it covers all bugs originating from all the software that aren't installed in the default installation. I mean, Ubuntu's page lists advisories on PostgreSQL, MySQL, tetex, perl, PHP, emacs, CUPS, Thunderbird, ImageMagick, vim, etc... Is the idiot considering the reports regarding those software packages as an operating system vulnerability? The very same thing applies to RHEL Desktop Workstation. It lists both KDE and GNOME advisories along with packages like, again, PostgreSQL, Firefox, ruby, pam, CUPS, tomcat, fetchmail, squirrelmal, PHP, evolution, etc... Quite a few of those packages can't even run on the same system.
Firefox, Opera, Safari, and the various other Gecko/KHTML/WebKit derivatives aren't on their own significant enough to warrant special treatment
Oddly enough, according to some sites Firefox is currently the dominant browser in the market. So I guess that it's time for some web developers to get off their asses and stop making excuses to continue producing broken sites and ignoring the standards.
Yes -- and that's as high as you can (typically) rise in society. The biggest difference I see between the USA and Europe is that if you want to raise your class and become rich in the USA, it's encouraged, applauded, and most imporantly, perfectly possible. In Europe, it's very, very difficult to become independently wealthy. And if you do want to try, the society frowns on it. It does happen occasionally, but it's very rare.
It seems that you inadvertently touched the point where the European and American perspectives clash. It's not how easy or hard it is to become wealthy but the very perception of what being wealthy means.
What struck out from the beginning is your implicit obsession with money, as if it is the dominant objective in mind. Being successful means not only stockpiling the most money but also showing it off the most extravagant exterior signs of wealth. Another incomprehensible detail is how Americans perceive class as being showing off as many exterior signs of wealth as possible. That means that in america a character like Paris Hilton is seen as classy and successful, when the truth is that a character like that is nothing more than cheap white trash. Just because you can afford real diamonds instead of plastic trinkets or you live in a suite instead of a trailer it doesn't mean you are any more posh. Yet, somehow Americans perceive her, and others who emulate her, as successful, posh people. Even as role models. Europeans aren't obsessed with material wealth as Americans are. Europeans do enjoy consumerism and do buy a lot of stuff but Americans just act like that was their sole purpose in life. Well, that isn't healty at all.
The most important freedom is economic freedom.
Indeed and yet again Europeans do have more economic freedom. Europeans do pay a lot of taxes but those taxes are used to fund basic, fundamental services that benefit the entire fabric of society. The public health service is an European institution that pretty much defines if a society is civilized or not. The public education system is also an European institution. As soon as no citizen is barred from progressing academically (which does more to climb the class hierarchy than money) due to economic constraints or receives a de-facto death sentence due to being poor, the entire society benefits. It constantly amazes me how a society can accept the idea of success and even the concept of life and death can and should depend on the money you make.
Perhaps our freedoms, which while not spectacular, vastly outclass the rest of the world, allow our best and brightest to vastly outperform the best and brightest of more nations?
That's a nice view and all and it may even give you that fuzzy feeling in your tummy but unfortunately it doesn't have anything to do with reality. At all. The US's R&D success was accomplished and is maintained through a single factor: money. Lots of money. It has absolutely nothing to do with freedom nor other patriotic drivel. The US is a very rich nation that dumps loads of cash into research. If you happen to be a talented researcher who happens to like receiving recognition in the form of cold hard cash then you will find that combination attractive, specially if your current job doesn't offer you the research funding you need and your current salary is less than 2000 dollars a month.
I have to say that your post is the single most informative and concise text I've ever read about this network neutrality racketeering scheme. The fact that you posted it as a followup to a post which oozes of astroturfing makes it even greater.
Kudos for your post. It's posts like yours that makes it worth spending time reading slashdot.
Could someone please explain how exactly is there a crisis? I mean, the article states that the only thing that is happening is that the US national helium reserve is being depleted, an artificial stockpile program that stopped stockpiling due to being too expensive. Then it is stated that there are plenty sources of helium but no one bothers to take advantage of them due to the fact that at the moment it simply does not make anyone any money. So, to sum things up, no one bothers to store helium because it isn't cost effective and no one bothers to mine helium because there isn't any money to be made by it.
Doesn't that mean that the offer outweighs the demand by a landslide? Doesn't this mean that there were a lot of people smooching the US national helium reserve for a long time?
And the fact that you and others like you are using the acceptance of the SSN along with national IDs as the justification to impose more programs like this one that go even further and kill privacy entirely is supposed to be a good way to demonstrate that there is absolutely no slippery slope nor creep??
I already said why: software support. And an optical drive doesn't hurt either.
Software support is not nor it should ever be tied to hardware sales. Moreover, claiming that a user needs windows because of software support doesn't make any sense. And of course, the computer does have USB ports. If nowadays USB HDs are being used by everyone plus their dog, I don't see how exactly the thought of an USB optical drive is far-fetched. So, again, why exactly do you believe anyone would want to "end up willing to spend more"?
The allure of low priced PCs for the neophyte is a great one but one of two things are likely to happen: They'll either find out that they want more and end up willing to spend more and probably choose Windows for the software support or they'll find that the machine suits their purposes and latch onto them for a larger than normal span of time and repeat customers will be next to nil.
The thing is, the age of the forced upgrade cycle is for PCs are long gone. Nowadays, the computing power of even the lowest end computer is more than enough to do everything a normal user needs to do. No one needs teraflops or multiple processors to read emails, browse the web or watch videos. Heck, people were doing exactly that a few years ago and back then the regular desktop PC power was already more than enough. Moreover, there isn't a single killer application which forces any user to spend money on any new system beyond the low end. That includes games, where the dominating factor resides exclusively in the graphics card and the only difference between the low-end and the high end, both using the same graphics card, is less than 10% hit on the already smooth frame rate.
So why exactly do you believe anyone would want to "end up willing to spend more"? Because they want to top their neighbour? Because they want to burn money away? I don't think so.
It takes a narrow minded person to believe in the basket analogy, whether you're on the God side or the science side.
The funny thing is, you are clearly demonstrating that YOU are the one who is impaired by a "narrow mind". You see, there isn't a "god side" or a "science side" and science and god aren't obviously opposite concepts. They are made out to be by narrow-minded, intolerant morons who, driven by their personal need to see their personal god, along with their personal interpretations of their actions, messages and will, want to make their religious opinions out to be the inquestionable, complete answer to all things. Then those religious morons, when confronted with a different explanation of some issue which, although it is structured on logic, deductive reasoning and backed up with tangible proof, is completely opposite to your personal religious explanation... Then you feel threatened. You feel it threatens your authority and therefore your personal god's authority.
The sad thing is that just because your religious-based explanation is wrong, it doesn't diminsish your personal god. At all. It only means you are wrong and therefore the only thing that science erodes is your personal authority that was based on unfounded claims based on your personal opinions to begin with. So you, and other narrow-minded morons like you, in order to avoid seeing their religion-driven authority being eroded, instead of embracing a different explanation (which doesn't diminish your personal god or any religion at all) you fight to preserve the status quo. So you feel compelled to make science, which is nothing more than a means to rationally extract conclusions through tangible evidence, to be an antagonist of your personal god, which it isn't. Just because earth isn't the center of the universe it doesn't mean that your whole religion ceassed making sense.
The format is, in effect, still in development and there is already an independent annex dedicated to deprecated functionality. How exactly is it possible for a decent format to have deprecated features even before it exists?
If you really had read the article then you would understand that the relation between this project and the US military is not a "paragraph out of context". The article states not only that the US defence department studied this option in the past but scrapped it for being too expensive, which nowadays, with all the developments on solar technology and materials, it is clearly not. Moreover, it also states, and you've seen to missed it, that this particular project has the US military as "an influential backer".
Then you go on about "a war mashine pushing around a tiny nation". I have to compliment you on your imagination, as neither the article nor my post mentions anything remotely related to oppressing anyone. Palau was chosen to be the place where they test this technology. That is all. How exactly do you justify the jump from "testing technology" to "a war machine pushing around a tiny nation"? You don't and you can't.
And then you mention the business aspect of it, as if it was some sort of proof that this project is not related to any military application, right after conveniently ignoring the fact that the US military is described as "influential backer". What you failed to understand is that the US of A, practically since it became an independent nation, depends on private business to supply it's military. whether through direct funding, starting companies or through procurement.
So maybe you could pay some attention to the articles you claim you've read.
Indeed. The slashdot post claims that "the island nation of Palau is looking into creating a satellite-to-ground power transmission system" but after reading a couple of sentences in that article, the reader realizes that this is nothing more than a US military project, where they are testing a means to get energy from space to any point in the globe, which is a godsend in terms of economy (cheap energy) and logistics (no need to carry fuel from A to B). The only reason the US military chose Palau is that it's a puny archipelago nation with an extremely low population density (20000 inhabitants per 458 sq km). Those characteristics will reduce the probability of a nasty disaster (firing an energy beam from a moving platform from space into the surface?) and help study the effects of a misfiring, for example.
So this has nothing to do with Palau getting an hightech energy source. Palau is simply the guinea pig for a project ran by the US military that aims to further develop their war machine. I really don't believe that Palau will benefit at all from this energy source. There won't be 1k homes powered by any US experimental project and surely the US won't dedicate such a valuable war asset to power a puny, irrelevant island nation.
After all, you had a larger net performance gain from upgrading to 2 32Bit cores than to one 64Bit one.
It appears you failed to notice that the architectures of AMD's and Intel's multi-core processors are both x86-64. That means that we are upgrading to two 64-bit cores.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't you mean 2.3 billion people? I mean, over 80% of the world's cell phones? The world doesn't end at your doorstop, you know?
To make matters worse, some attacks may even occur if you are dealing with safe file types, like a PNG or even PDF. Some security problems exist due to the user's ignorance or idiocy but "some" isn't exactly the same thing as "all".
It's not but NATO, through their cold war era war games, acknowledged that they were the first ones to deploy nuclear weapons in an open conflict with the soviet union. If I recall correctly, NATO's tactics included, as one of the very first actions, nuking the hell out of (or into?) the Volga river to hinder the soviet tank advance.
With the US pressuring every nation to stay the hell away from Cuba, the fact that Canada decided to ignore the US's diplomatic pressure and become a strong trade partner of Cuba is nothing shy of "treating them like a NATO member".
Wrong. You still don't get it, do you? A program simply does not have the capability to state how many cores it will use. No matter how many times you repeat yourself, a program does not nor can it ever "use cores". The only thing that a program is capable of doing is defining what portions of the code may run parallel. That's all. The rest of the job is up to the operating system which, as it may surprise you, is the sole responsible of managing the system's resources, including CPU time.
Wrong again. What you said doesn't make any sense at all and reveals a deep ignorance on the subject. See, it also wouldn't make any sense to state that a certain operating system could only run a "power of two" number of processes at any given time. So exactly why would it make any sense to state that you could only design applications so that they could only run power of two number of processes/threads? The mechanism that executes the application's threads/processes is the exact same mechanism that executes all the independent processes. Don't you even realize that? Moreover, there isn't a single parallelization interface that forces a programmer to only specify a power of two number of processes/threads. Anyone can run fork() as many times they wish, as pthreads_create() can run as many times you need. Heck, did you ever heard of the make utility? Do you happen to know that it has a nifty little option which enables the user to specify the number of jobs it runs parallel? For example, do you understand what make --jobs=3 does? And what about make --jobs=7? I bet it blew your mind.
Just because your ignorance is forcing you to make stuff along about parallel computing it doesn't mean you need to imagine what's the system load of some random person's computer which is located somewhere across the globe. You only end up looking sillier.
Processes cannot control their own processor affinity, at least not when running on those operating systems (and countless others). What the processes (and, through other mecanisms, also the users) are able to do is hint the operating system to run a certain process on a certain processor. The operating system takes those hints in condideration but it isn't forced to obey those hints.
You've just demonstrated that you don't have a clue about how an application is ran, let alone how an operating system manages the running processes. For starters, you keep on blabbering about "programs handling cores". That does not have any basis on reality, as the only "program" that can be stated that handles "cores" is the operating system. That's all. The remaining programs that the operating system executes may spawn processes and may be multi-threaded but they do not nor they can handle "cores". At all.
Moreover, even if a certain program, running on a 4-core system, generates 4 processes or threads, you still cannot claim that that particular program "handles 4 cores". It is up to the operating system to manage the system's resources, including where and how a process is ran. It might even run all the 4 processes or threads in the same core.
Another silly thing that you imply which is clearly wrong is that a user can only take advantage of the multiple cores in a system if that user happens to run applications which spawn as many processes or threads as the number of cores. That is just plain wrong. The operating system manages the execution of all the system's processes and threads, which means that it distributes the execution of those processes and threads through all the available processing cores. So, if you run 4 separate applications (single-process/threaded) on a decent operating system running on a 4 processing core system then the operating system may end up executing those 4 separate applications in the 4 separate processing cores. As any desktop computer is running at any given time more than 20 different processes (single or multi-threaded) then the advantage of having more processing cores on your system is rather obvious.
But hey, don't let logic and concrete knowledge on the issue get in the way of your judgement.
You mean like POSIX?
You are being rather silly here. It's one thing for a corporation to offer vague promises in the form of a glorified press release. Having those promises being enforced by law is a whole different thing. How many times have corporations swore to something (Google's "don't do evil", Apple's "laptops should not be used on laps", Microsoft's "we take standards very seriously/ security is our prime objective", etc...) to then see them blatantly breaking their promise?
Browsing those, the first thing that pops out is that it covers all bugs originating from all the software that aren't installed in the default installation. I mean, Ubuntu's page lists advisories on PostgreSQL, MySQL, tetex, perl, PHP, emacs, CUPS, Thunderbird, ImageMagick, vim, etc... Is the idiot considering the reports regarding those software packages as an operating system vulnerability? The very same thing applies to RHEL Desktop Workstation. It lists both KDE and GNOME advisories along with packages like, again, PostgreSQL, Firefox, ruby, pam, CUPS, tomcat, fetchmail, squirrelmal, PHP, evolution, etc... Quite a few of those packages can't even run on the same system.
Oddly enough, according to some sites Firefox is currently the dominant browser in the market. So I guess that it's time for some web developers to get off their asses and stop making excuses to continue producing broken sites and ignoring the standards.
It seems that you inadvertently touched the point where the European and American perspectives clash. It's not how easy or hard it is to become wealthy but the very perception of what being wealthy means.
What struck out from the beginning is your implicit obsession with money, as if it is the dominant objective in mind. Being successful means not only stockpiling the most money but also showing it off the most extravagant exterior signs of wealth. Another incomprehensible detail is how Americans perceive class as being showing off as many exterior signs of wealth as possible. That means that in america a character like Paris Hilton is seen as classy and successful, when the truth is that a character like that is nothing more than cheap white trash. Just because you can afford real diamonds instead of plastic trinkets or you live in a suite instead of a trailer it doesn't mean you are any more posh. Yet, somehow Americans perceive her, and others who emulate her, as successful, posh people. Even as role models. Europeans aren't obsessed with material wealth as Americans are. Europeans do enjoy consumerism and do buy a lot of stuff but Americans just act like that was their sole purpose in life. Well, that isn't healty at all.
Indeed and yet again Europeans do have more economic freedom. Europeans do pay a lot of taxes but those taxes are used to fund basic, fundamental services that benefit the entire fabric of society. The public health service is an European institution that pretty much defines if a society is civilized or not. The public education system is also an European institution. As soon as no citizen is barred from progressing academically (which does more to climb the class hierarchy than money) due to economic constraints or receives a de-facto death sentence due to being poor, the entire society benefits. It constantly amazes me how a society can accept the idea of success and even the concept of life and death can and should depend on the money you make.
That's a nice view and all and it may even give you that fuzzy feeling in your tummy but unfortunately it doesn't have anything to do with reality. At all. The US's R&D success was accomplished and is maintained through a single factor: money. Lots of money. It has absolutely nothing to do with freedom nor other patriotic drivel. The US is a very rich nation that dumps loads of cash into research. If you happen to be a talented researcher who happens to like receiving recognition in the form of cold hard cash then you will find that combination attractive, specially if your current job doesn't offer you the research funding you need and your current salary is less than 2000 dollars a month.
I have to say that your post is the single most informative and concise text I've ever read about this network neutrality racketeering scheme. The fact that you posted it as a followup to a post which oozes of astroturfing makes it even greater.
Kudos for your post. It's posts like yours that makes it worth spending time reading slashdot.
Could someone please explain how exactly is there a crisis? I mean, the article states that the only thing that is happening is that the US national helium reserve is being depleted, an artificial stockpile program that stopped stockpiling due to being too expensive. Then it is stated that there are plenty sources of helium but no one bothers to take advantage of them due to the fact that at the moment it simply does not make anyone any money. So, to sum things up, no one bothers to store helium because it isn't cost effective and no one bothers to mine helium because there isn't any money to be made by it.
Doesn't that mean that the offer outweighs the demand by a landslide? Doesn't this mean that there were a lot of people smooching the US national helium reserve for a long time?
And the fact that you and others like you are using the acceptance of the SSN along with national IDs as the justification to impose more programs like this one that go even further and kill privacy entirely is supposed to be a good way to demonstrate that there is absolutely no slippery slope nor creep??
Software support is not nor it should ever be tied to hardware sales. Moreover, claiming that a user needs windows because of software support doesn't make any sense. And of course, the computer does have USB ports. If nowadays USB HDs are being used by everyone plus their dog, I don't see how exactly the thought of an USB optical drive is far-fetched. So, again, why exactly do you believe anyone would want to "end up willing to spend more"?
The thing is, the age of the forced upgrade cycle is for PCs are long gone. Nowadays, the computing power of even the lowest end computer is more than enough to do everything a normal user needs to do. No one needs teraflops or multiple processors to read emails, browse the web or watch videos. Heck, people were doing exactly that a few years ago and back then the regular desktop PC power was already more than enough. Moreover, there isn't a single killer application which forces any user to spend money on any new system beyond the low end. That includes games, where the dominating factor resides exclusively in the graphics card and the only difference between the low-end and the high end, both using the same graphics card, is less than 10% hit on the already smooth frame rate.
So why exactly do you believe anyone would want to "end up willing to spend more"? Because they want to top their neighbour? Because they want to burn money away? I don't think so.
Wouldn't it make more sense if you thought of 26*32 instead of far-fetched assumptions?
The funny thing is, you are clearly demonstrating that YOU are the one who is impaired by a "narrow mind". You see, there isn't a "god side" or a "science side" and science and god aren't obviously opposite concepts. They are made out to be by narrow-minded, intolerant morons who, driven by their personal need to see their personal god, along with their personal interpretations of their actions, messages and will, want to make their religious opinions out to be the inquestionable, complete answer to all things. Then those religious morons, when confronted with a different explanation of some issue which, although it is structured on logic, deductive reasoning and backed up with tangible proof, is completely opposite to your personal religious explanation... Then you feel threatened. You feel it threatens your authority and therefore your personal god's authority.
The sad thing is that just because your religious-based explanation is wrong, it doesn't diminsish your personal god. At all. It only means you are wrong and therefore the only thing that science erodes is your personal authority that was based on unfounded claims based on your personal opinions to begin with. So you, and other narrow-minded morons like you, in order to avoid seeing their religion-driven authority being eroded, instead of embracing a different explanation (which doesn't diminish your personal god or any religion at all) you fight to preserve the status quo. So you feel compelled to make science, which is nothing more than a means to rationally extract conclusions through tangible evidence, to be an antagonist of your personal god, which it isn't. Just because earth isn't the center of the universe it doesn't mean that your whole religion ceassed making sense.
The format is, in effect, still in development and there is already an independent annex dedicated to deprecated functionality. How exactly is it possible for a decent format to have deprecated features even before it exists?
Goatse guy? Is that you?
If you really had read the article then you would understand that the relation between this project and the US military is not a "paragraph out of context". The article states not only that the US defence department studied this option in the past but scrapped it for being too expensive, which nowadays, with all the developments on solar technology and materials, it is clearly not. Moreover, it also states, and you've seen to missed it, that this particular project has the US military as "an influential backer".
Then you go on about "a war mashine pushing around a tiny nation". I have to compliment you on your imagination, as neither the article nor my post mentions anything remotely related to oppressing anyone. Palau was chosen to be the place where they test this technology. That is all. How exactly do you justify the jump from "testing technology" to "a war machine pushing around a tiny nation"? You don't and you can't.
And then you mention the business aspect of it, as if it was some sort of proof that this project is not related to any military application, right after conveniently ignoring the fact that the US military is described as "influential backer". What you failed to understand is that the US of A, practically since it became an independent nation, depends on private business to supply it's military. whether through direct funding, starting companies or through procurement.
So maybe you could pay some attention to the articles you claim you've read.
Indeed. The slashdot post claims that "the island nation of Palau is looking into creating a satellite-to-ground power transmission system" but after reading a couple of sentences in that article, the reader realizes that this is nothing more than a US military project, where they are testing a means to get energy from space to any point in the globe, which is a godsend in terms of economy (cheap energy) and logistics (no need to carry fuel from A to B). The only reason the US military chose Palau is that it's a puny archipelago nation with an extremely low population density (20000 inhabitants per 458 sq km). Those characteristics will reduce the probability of a nasty disaster (firing an energy beam from a moving platform from space into the surface?) and help study the effects of a misfiring, for example.
So this has nothing to do with Palau getting an hightech energy source. Palau is simply the guinea pig for a project ran by the US military that aims to further develop their war machine. I really don't believe that Palau will benefit at all from this energy source. There won't be 1k homes powered by any US experimental project and surely the US won't dedicate such a valuable war asset to power a puny, irrelevant island nation.
It appears you failed to notice that the architectures of AMD's and Intel's multi-core processors are both x86-64. That means that we are upgrading to two 64-bit cores.