Because Firefox are trying to jump on the "tablet" bandwagon* is my guess. That or artists are setting the agenda instead of seasoned software developers.
You are right in that "major version" shouldn't change more often then maybe yearly. Other updates should just be bug patches and new features that shouldn't break the browser. When they need to do something that significantly breaks compatibility then they can up the "major version".
* If they want to do a minimalist UI for tablets then they should just include a menu option that enables the minimalist UI. Modern monitors aren't so tiny that having a permanent status bar or URL bar is eating to much screen real estate. We coped with traditional browser UIs in the days of 15 inch CRTs we can cope today.
I am still using Firefox 3.6 and will stay that way until either Mozilla lay down the crack pipe or I find another browser whose UI designers aren't similarly crack addled (sorry Chrome).
You target a fraction of the total population because "family appeal" games are hard to do and significant chunks of the market don't want them. Most action movies are aimed at 16-30 year old males for example. Sure some women like them but the overwhelming market for such fare is 16-30 year old males.
The console market being focused on men (the casual game market has a huge female audience but the article isn't about that) is because traditionally only males could get away with sitting inside all day playing video games due to social reasons. Most content producers aren't in the business of social change so they just aimed their product at the market as it was.
Now days young women spend as much time playing Bedazzled or Farmville as young men do playing Call of Duty. So we will increasingly see AAA console titles that are aimed at a female audience (which is good for all of us, as it means games will get more sophisticated stories and less retarded characters).
"My mechanic" is different from "random mechanic". If you walked in off the street and asked a random mechanic to let you borrow some equipment for a quick test most of them would tell you to piss off, so I don't see why you expect computer technicians to be any different.
The point I was making was that guy had no reason to think you were a customer. Ask anyone in retail these days and they will tell you most of the people in the store aren't customers. They come in to look at products, try them etc, and then go home and buy it on the Internet.
Personally I would have tested the PSU for you, but that is because I am a nice guy with no "business sense". It is also why I got let go from tech support when the GFC hit.
P.S. And no my use of "bleeding edge" didn't imply self-assembled machines are inherently worse. It implied that "bleeding edge" machines are inherently unstable via the fact they are at the bleeding edge. Gamers often build rigs that deliberately push components past what they are spec'd for (eg I am running over clocked and over voltage RAM).
P.P.S I enjoyed my time in tech support mostly when the boss was away and I could help people with quick jobs without having to check a machine in.
Why would a "technician" need to go to another random "technicians" business and borrow a tool AND be a repeat customer?
I fully believe that providing quick solutions like this is good for customer retention* in general, but that is for customers not for "technicians" that just want to borrow my tools and interfere with me working.
* My previous employer didn't, which is why I got out of tech support for a few years.
There is no such thing as real Anonymity on the Internet. At best you have a masquerade and hope the Government isn't interested enough in going after you. That is what Anonymous is founded upon. Security through obscurity in the crowd. Sure, some individuals get nabbed but the rest of the horde escapes capture.
I have hung around Anonymous and the like long enough to know that anyone who has a consistent online identity can be easily traced and "doxed". The only reason the Government doesn't do this kind of tracking much is because it is expensive and generally not worth the time (but you can be sure Bin Laden used the "air gap" network security method for a reason).
The only thing that stops the Government tracking every-bodies online activity is cost (the same thing that stops them doing it in physical space). But if you are a member of a small group like LulzSec then all the mythos of Anonymous won't protect you for Jack (most members of LulzSec have apparently already been doxed by a private group).
LulzSec and the like were hoping to be the "anarchist in a riot" and stir the masses up in revolt against The System. They failed and will be tracked and arrested. Unfortunately for The System they will be replaced as fast as they are caught.
They might have been trying to scam you but you come of as an ass for trying to "borrow" their tools to fix your problem without paying them. I mean would you go into a random automotive mechanic and ask to borrow their testing equipment because you think you know what is broken in your car? Do you like it when people barge into your work and waste your time? I mean I could understand if you bought the PSU from them but otherwise you come off as an ass.
Also any real geek knows those power supply testers aren't worth the effort to plug them in. All they are is a very basic voltmeter which is virtually worthless for figuring out a problem with a self-assembled "bleeding edge" machine (where there are often problems with pulling too much current off some rails, especially at power up). Also those PSU testers often don't put enough of a load to generate accurate voltage readings anyway.
If it was me I wouldn't have believed you had tech knowledge simply because you a) Didn't own a voltmeter to test your PSU and b) didn't have additional PSUs to swap for testing. I would assume you were a gamer building equipment based on reviews in magazines but without any understanding of the basics.
And Wall Street is REGULATED. That is why BitCoin is a joke. Every unregulated scheme like this just attracts all the vultures and scam artists that are mostly controlled in the real financial system. And yet the real financial system constantly has crashes, scams, and high level malfeasance. Trading in BitCoin if you are an honest person is like a kid hanging out at a NAMBLA convention. The only way to turn a profit on the system was to either be an early adopter, be a scammer and influence the market for profit, or be a vulture waiting to pick over the remains left by the scammers.
That said BitCoin is an interesting prototype for how real currency* exchange should take place, as the current banking system is really a joke and could benefit from the level of accountability built into BitCoin.
* Real currencies need to be usable to pay your taxes and acceptable for the purchase of most goods. Right now BitCoins are a currency in the way that stocks are.
You just don't get it. The original, from 4chan, Anonymous are a bunch of trolls and always have been. The only time anything approaching morality entered the mass consciousness of Anon was during Project Chanology, and if anyone hurts cats. Long before Anonymous was in the news they were happily trolling Nazis, furries, pedos, twelve year old girls, quadriplegics, gay kids, Christians, Muslims, Atheists etc.
The only rule is "we do it for the lulz".
The moral hacktivist Anonymous of Project Chanology era was entirely a creation of a handful of individuals who did a very good job of media manipulation. The vast majority of Anons were just participating because it was funny to annoy the Scientologists.
4chan is not your personal army, but if you offer them an interesting enough target they will participate until bored. If your target isn't interesting they are just as likely to track down your docs and harass you instead of the target.
The anonymity in the idea of "Anonymous" isn't so much in not posting with your name, it is being an individual in a large crowd. Even if they can track down some individuals they still can't track and label everyone in the crowd.
10 tabs is kindergarten for serious browsers. The problem from what I can tell is with people who have A LOT of tabs open for a long time. Remember not everyone shuts down their computer each night, some people keep Firefox instances running for months.
Also even if it only uses 250MB that is unacceptable if that is more then it actually needs to use. If everyone followed the "people have heaps of memory so don't worry about minor memory leaks" then we would quickly find our abundant memory filling up. Memory bloat and "just reboot" are never acceptable.
The key is "nearly identical brain reactions". I have suffered tremendous emotional pain in my life and it is similar but different to physical pain. Also masochists are abnormal so there is no guarantee they process pain the same way as non-masochists.
IMO the most logical explanation for the correlation between cell phone use and cancer is that the cancers are from the KNOWN carcinogens that leech from plastics. Like the plastic cases that most phones used until the iPhone made metal/glass cases cool. Holding a piece of carcinogen leaking plastic to your head for hours on end for a decade or more seems a much more logical culprit then non-ionising radiation.
P.S. The plastic theory would probably explain why bowel cancer is spiking amongst the young. Young people are eating/drinking from crappy plastic containers at higher rates then ever. If you like carrying water around all the time get a metal or glass flask.
Link them. I just checked the top Google results and there is a whole ONE paper with a group of 25 men which shows a correlation. There is another which covers most of the US forces in Korea and specifically looked at radar technicians which found no correlation (in fact for several categories they had lower cancer rates). All the others are mixed which screams to me "random cancer cluster" not "non-ionising radiation causes cancer".
The thing you are missing is that early radar equipment used exciters that emitted large amounts of IONISING radiation. The stuff that come out of the antenna was non-ionising, but it wouldn't have been healthy sitting next to the actual transmitter.
And those power levels of orders of magnitudes higher then from a cell phone. So the claim is that not only does non-ionising radiation cause cancer in a way that hasn't been identified in over a century of research, but that repeated small exposures are worse then single large exposures of the same overall magnitude. The opposite of how ionising radiation works.
CGI these days is mostly labour based. A render farm is costly upfront but all the players have massive ones sitting waiting for jobs. The thing that costs money is paying good artists for the huge amounts of work you need. Creating fully CGI characters and sets (like George probably wants because he is an idiot) is a lot different from doing some touching up like removing wires from stuntmen.
Star Wars TV could be done no more expensive then shows like Battlestar Galactica or Stargate. In nearly all the stories the aliens are mostly background characters so who cares if they are just rubber masks? Hell, in the Imperial period you could just set the show in a particularly xenophobic part of Imperial space and barely have to worry about aliens.
The problem is a film producer/director trying to work in TV. TV is a world of compromise and spreading your money really thin. A big budget movie producer/director doesn't have the skill set or correct mindset (Spielbergs mini-series are hellishly expensive).
The purpose of the modern education system is to precisely be replacement parents so that the real parents can be off being "productive members of society" in factories/cube farms.
And I think the Principals implication was that a lot of kids weren't getting those things despite their ostensibly being programmes out there. Also I doubt your local public library is funded well enough to provide access to thousands of computers and TEXT books (that is what he was talking about, not novels, a lot of districts are hurting for texts printed this century) for public school kids.
I didn't miss the point I disagreed with the terrible attempt at getting the point across.
Also as far as I know no one has hacked modern critical systems with a single computer and free software. All the stuff making news is very sophisticated team efforts. Stuxnet required physically stealing encryption keys IIRC.
The kind of damage a single hacker can cause is probably less then what a single back-hoe operator can do. And foreign network attacks are probably less of a threat then foreign agents working from inside the critical systems.
"With nuclear or biological weapons, the technical threshold is high. With cyber the finger hovering over the button could be anyone from a state to a student"
What a crock. Any engineering student who couldn't design a fission based nuclear bomb is going to be a terrible engineer. Hell, the guy who has literally "written the book" on the Manhattan Project bombs is a freaking truck driver*. And you have the same with biological weapons. Contrary to what movies show most research into biological weapons wasn't about genetic modification it was simply on how to make the bugs easy to disperse and store. And most of it was done in the 50's and 60's. To combat misuse of both the answer has been to control the key ingredients of isotopes and germs.
With "cyber" weapons it is the opposite. It is impossible to control the key ingredient, and the 'state of the art' has moved far past the stage where individuals are dominant. Even in the criminal world malware is built by teams. The technical threshold is very high and no individual is going to pull off well planned and well executed attack against a nations infrastructure. The "cyber wars" we see now are all done by large teams of hackers. When nations start actively deploying "cyber warfare" units and the like it will further raise the technical bar.
P.S. The fingers actually "hovering over the buttons" of NBC weapons were mostly 18-20 year old kids. The systems you see in movies where the president needs to give a code so nukes can be launched is mostly a crock. The US Strategic Air Command famously set the "permissive action locks" on its nukes to the equivalent of "1111" because it believed the system was too complicated to be relied upon.
So will this make peoples web apps and office programs run noticeably better?
Because that is what the vast majority of computers are being used for even in the commercial sector. Computer hardware peaked for the average user around 2000. Now as the article points out we are sitting around waiting for better software*. AMD would be better off developing that software then pushing hardware for a need that mostly doesn't exist.
* Why is it that stuff like user agents and other forms of AI mostly disappeared from the scene in the 90's? We have the power now to run the things that everyone seemed to be working on back then.
I thought most Slashdotters had a basic understanding of science? Non-ionising radiation is basically all the same. It doesn't matter if it comes from the magnetron in a microwave oven or your Wi-Fi AP. The only issue as to whether it will cook you is the power you absorb. Microwave ovens tend to run in the range of 500-1000+ watts of power, your AP probably puts out below 5 watts. It doesn't take much to figure out that minor and completely safe levels of leakage from the microwave will heavily interfere with Wi-Fi.
Of course I have actually had RF burns from playing with radios so I am not terrified of non-ionising radiation like luddites are.
The real issue with GM crops is patents. If you grow non-GM crops and your neighbour puts in GM crops will you better start paying that rent money to Monsanto because your crops will be contaminated with GM plants in short order and due to retarded IP laws you will be liable for this "patent infringement".
If Monsanto and the like gets their way every single farmer will be paying monopoly rents due to the fact that cross pollination and wind blown seeds can not be contained. Patent laws are not designed to be applied where "infringement" can happen without human intervention.
Just because it is standard practice doesn't change the fucking point.
Seizing and auctioning of property by law enforcement ON THE MERE SUSPICION* of it being connected with crime is absolutely intended to render certain people as non-persons (aka people without fundamental rights).
Ted Kaczynski is fucking crazy but that doesn't mean his personal property should be allowed to be seized and sold. Seized for the purpose of investigation is entirely different.
* If the police in most of the English speaking world decide some asset was bought with the proceeds of crime it is up to the, former, owner to prove this isn't true. This is the reason the "war on drugs" has overwhelming law enforcement support, it gives them carte blanche to intimidate people by threatening seizure.
That is "soft-off". ie you are asking politely for some IC some where to allow you to turn the device off. If the device has locked up this probably won't work*.
And with the amount of devices that don't really turn off** when you "turn them off" these days soft-off only gets really annoying.
* PC style architecture where the OS handles single press and the independent PSU handles press-and-hold is sadly a rarity these days. ** Hand held radio with soft-off, battery drained after two weeks "off". Hand held oscilloscope, battery fine after a month off.
As mentioned earlier in the thread "safe" limits for ionising radiation don't exist. One single particle could be the one that hits a critical bit of DNA and gives you lethal cancer, or a billion particles could pass right through you and cause no damage. The "safety" limits set by government bodies are based on poor science and are complete bullshit.
Oh and also ALL food has radioactive particles. It did before atmospheric nuclear testing, and it especially does after all the atmospheric testing that went on. The fact is that unless a piece of food is INCREDIBLY contaminated it is no more a risk then the thousands of risky things we humans do every day and don't even think about.
Those who die from cancer caused by this leak will be out weighed a thousand times by those who die in car accidents, easily preventable infectious disease, and diet related disease. Let alone minor stuff like carcinogenic fumes released from the plastic that most Japanese homes are packed full of.
Spending hundreds of dollars (probably closer to a thousand in the current panic) on a radiation detector and then continuing to drive a car is the sign of an irrational person with no capacity for risk assessment.
Slashdot Mirror
Because Firefox are trying to jump on the "tablet" bandwagon* is my guess. That or artists are setting the agenda instead of seasoned software developers.
You are right in that "major version" shouldn't change more often then maybe yearly. Other updates should just be bug patches and new features that shouldn't break the browser. When they need to do something that significantly breaks compatibility then they can up the "major version".
* If they want to do a minimalist UI for tablets then they should just include a menu option that enables the minimalist UI. Modern monitors aren't so tiny that having a permanent status bar or URL bar is eating to much screen real estate. We coped with traditional browser UIs in the days of 15 inch CRTs we can cope today.
I am still using Firefox 3.6 and will stay that way until either Mozilla lay down the crack pipe or I find another browser whose UI designers aren't similarly crack addled (sorry Chrome).
You target a fraction of the total population because "family appeal" games are hard to do and significant chunks of the market don't want them. Most action movies are aimed at 16-30 year old males for example. Sure some women like them but the overwhelming market for such fare is 16-30 year old males.
The console market being focused on men (the casual game market has a huge female audience but the article isn't about that) is because traditionally only males could get away with sitting inside all day playing video games due to social reasons. Most content producers aren't in the business of social change so they just aimed their product at the market as it was.
Now days young women spend as much time playing Bedazzled or Farmville as young men do playing Call of Duty. So we will increasingly see AAA console titles that are aimed at a female audience (which is good for all of us, as it means games will get more sophisticated stories and less retarded characters).
"My mechanic" is different from "random mechanic". If you walked in off the street and asked a random mechanic to let you borrow some equipment for a quick test most of them would tell you to piss off, so I don't see why you expect computer technicians to be any different.
The point I was making was that guy had no reason to think you were a customer. Ask anyone in retail these days and they will tell you most of the people in the store aren't customers. They come in to look at products, try them etc, and then go home and buy it on the Internet.
Personally I would have tested the PSU for you, but that is because I am a nice guy with no "business sense". It is also why I got let go from tech support when the GFC hit.
P.S. And no my use of "bleeding edge" didn't imply self-assembled machines are inherently worse. It implied that "bleeding edge" machines are inherently unstable via the fact they are at the bleeding edge. Gamers often build rigs that deliberately push components past what they are spec'd for (eg I am running over clocked and over voltage RAM).
P.P.S I enjoyed my time in tech support mostly when the boss was away and I could help people with quick jobs without having to check a machine in.
Why would a "technician" need to go to another random "technicians" business and borrow a tool AND be a repeat customer?
I fully believe that providing quick solutions like this is good for customer retention* in general, but that is for customers not for "technicians" that just want to borrow my tools and interfere with me working.
* My previous employer didn't, which is why I got out of tech support for a few years.
There is no such thing as real Anonymity on the Internet. At best you have a masquerade and hope the Government isn't interested enough in going after you. That is what Anonymous is founded upon. Security through obscurity in the crowd. Sure, some individuals get nabbed but the rest of the horde escapes capture.
I have hung around Anonymous and the like long enough to know that anyone who has a consistent online identity can be easily traced and "doxed". The only reason the Government doesn't do this kind of tracking much is because it is expensive and generally not worth the time (but you can be sure Bin Laden used the "air gap" network security method for a reason).
The only thing that stops the Government tracking every-bodies online activity is cost (the same thing that stops them doing it in physical space). But if you are a member of a small group like LulzSec then all the mythos of Anonymous won't protect you for Jack (most members of LulzSec have apparently already been doxed by a private group).
LulzSec and the like were hoping to be the "anarchist in a riot" and stir the masses up in revolt against The System. They failed and will be tracked and arrested. Unfortunately for The System they will be replaced as fast as they are caught.
They might have been trying to scam you but you come of as an ass for trying to "borrow" their tools to fix your problem without paying them. I mean would you go into a random automotive mechanic and ask to borrow their testing equipment because you think you know what is broken in your car? Do you like it when people barge into your work and waste your time? I mean I could understand if you bought the PSU from them but otherwise you come off as an ass.
Also any real geek knows those power supply testers aren't worth the effort to plug them in. All they are is a very basic voltmeter which is virtually worthless for figuring out a problem with a self-assembled "bleeding edge" machine (where there are often problems with pulling too much current off some rails, especially at power up). Also those PSU testers often don't put enough of a load to generate accurate voltage readings anyway.
If it was me I wouldn't have believed you had tech knowledge simply because you a) Didn't own a voltmeter to test your PSU and b) didn't have additional PSUs to swap for testing. I would assume you were a gamer building equipment based on reviews in magazines but without any understanding of the basics.
And Wall Street is REGULATED. That is why BitCoin is a joke. Every unregulated scheme like this just attracts all the vultures and scam artists that are mostly controlled in the real financial system. And yet the real financial system constantly has crashes, scams, and high level malfeasance. Trading in BitCoin if you are an honest person is like a kid hanging out at a NAMBLA convention. The only way to turn a profit on the system was to either be an early adopter, be a scammer and influence the market for profit, or be a vulture waiting to pick over the remains left by the scammers.
That said BitCoin is an interesting prototype for how real currency* exchange should take place, as the current banking system is really a joke and could benefit from the level of accountability built into BitCoin.
* Real currencies need to be usable to pay your taxes and acceptable for the purchase of most goods. Right now BitCoins are a currency in the way that stocks are.
You just don't get it. The original, from 4chan, Anonymous are a bunch of trolls and always have been. The only time anything approaching morality entered the mass consciousness of Anon was during Project Chanology, and if anyone hurts cats. Long before Anonymous was in the news they were happily trolling Nazis, furries, pedos, twelve year old girls, quadriplegics, gay kids, Christians, Muslims, Atheists etc.
The only rule is "we do it for the lulz".
The moral hacktivist Anonymous of Project Chanology era was entirely a creation of a handful of individuals who did a very good job of media manipulation. The vast majority of Anons were just participating because it was funny to annoy the Scientologists.
4chan is not your personal army, but if you offer them an interesting enough target they will participate until bored. If your target isn't interesting they are just as likely to track down your docs and harass you instead of the target.
The anonymity in the idea of "Anonymous" isn't so much in not posting with your name, it is being an individual in a large crowd. Even if they can track down some individuals they still can't track and label everyone in the crowd.
10 tabs is kindergarten for serious browsers. The problem from what I can tell is with people who have A LOT of tabs open for a long time. Remember not everyone shuts down their computer each night, some people keep Firefox instances running for months.
Also even if it only uses 250MB that is unacceptable if that is more then it actually needs to use. If everyone followed the "people have heaps of memory so don't worry about minor memory leaks" then we would quickly find our abundant memory filling up. Memory bloat and "just reboot" are never acceptable.
The key is "nearly identical brain reactions". I have suffered tremendous emotional pain in my life and it is similar but different to physical pain. Also masochists are abnormal so there is no guarantee they process pain the same way as non-masochists.
IMO the most logical explanation for the correlation between cell phone use and cancer is that the cancers are from the KNOWN carcinogens that leech from plastics. Like the plastic cases that most phones used until the iPhone made metal/glass cases cool. Holding a piece of carcinogen leaking plastic to your head for hours on end for a decade or more seems a much more logical culprit then non-ionising radiation.
P.S. The plastic theory would probably explain why bowel cancer is spiking amongst the young. Young people are eating/drinking from crappy plastic containers at higher rates then ever. If you like carrying water around all the time get a metal or glass flask.
Link them. I just checked the top Google results and there is a whole ONE paper with a group of 25 men which shows a correlation. There is another which covers most of the US forces in Korea and specifically looked at radar technicians which found no correlation (in fact for several categories they had lower cancer rates). All the others are mixed which screams to me "random cancer cluster" not "non-ionising radiation causes cancer".
The thing you are missing is that early radar equipment used exciters that emitted large amounts of IONISING radiation. The stuff that come out of the antenna was non-ionising, but it wouldn't have been healthy sitting next to the actual transmitter.
And those power levels of orders of magnitudes higher then from a cell phone. So the claim is that not only does non-ionising radiation cause cancer in a way that hasn't been identified in over a century of research, but that repeated small exposures are worse then single large exposures of the same overall magnitude. The opposite of how ionising radiation works.
CGI these days is mostly labour based. A render farm is costly upfront but all the players have massive ones sitting waiting for jobs. The thing that costs money is paying good artists for the huge amounts of work you need. Creating fully CGI characters and sets (like George probably wants because he is an idiot) is a lot different from doing some touching up like removing wires from stuntmen.
Star Wars TV could be done no more expensive then shows like Battlestar Galactica or Stargate. In nearly all the stories the aliens are mostly background characters so who cares if they are just rubber masks? Hell, in the Imperial period you could just set the show in a particularly xenophobic part of Imperial space and barely have to worry about aliens.
The problem is a film producer/director trying to work in TV. TV is a world of compromise and spreading your money really thin. A big budget movie producer/director doesn't have the skill set or correct mindset (Spielbergs mini-series are hellishly expensive).
The purpose of the modern education system is to precisely be replacement parents so that the real parents can be off being "productive members of society" in factories/cube farms.
And I think the Principals implication was that a lot of kids weren't getting those things despite their ostensibly being programmes out there. Also I doubt your local public library is funded well enough to provide access to thousands of computers and TEXT books (that is what he was talking about, not novels, a lot of districts are hurting for texts printed this century) for public school kids.
I didn't miss the point I disagreed with the terrible attempt at getting the point across.
Also as far as I know no one has hacked modern critical systems with a single computer and free software. All the stuff making news is very sophisticated team efforts. Stuxnet required physically stealing encryption keys IIRC.
The kind of damage a single hacker can cause is probably less then what a single back-hoe operator can do. And foreign network attacks are probably less of a threat then foreign agents working from inside the critical systems.
"With nuclear or biological weapons, the technical threshold is high. With cyber the finger hovering over the button could be anyone from a state to a student"
What a crock. Any engineering student who couldn't design a fission based nuclear bomb is going to be a terrible engineer. Hell, the guy who has literally "written the book" on the Manhattan Project bombs is a freaking truck driver*. And you have the same with biological weapons. Contrary to what movies show most research into biological weapons wasn't about genetic modification it was simply on how to make the bugs easy to disperse and store. And most of it was done in the 50's and 60's. To combat misuse of both the answer has been to control the key ingredients of isotopes and germs.
With "cyber" weapons it is the opposite. It is impossible to control the key ingredient, and the 'state of the art' has moved far past the stage where individuals are dominant. Even in the criminal world malware is built by teams. The technical threshold is very high and no individual is going to pull off well planned and well executed attack against a nations infrastructure. The "cyber wars" we see now are all done by large teams of hackers. When nations start actively deploying "cyber warfare" units and the like it will further raise the technical bar.
P.S. The fingers actually "hovering over the buttons" of NBC weapons were mostly 18-20 year old kids. The systems you see in movies where the president needs to give a code so nukes can be launched is mostly a crock. The US Strategic Air Command famously set the "permissive action locks" on its nukes to the equivalent of "1111" because it believed the system was too complicated to be relied upon.
*http://www.amazon.com/Atom-Bombs-Secret-Inside-Little/dp/B0006S2AJ0
So will this make peoples web apps and office programs run noticeably better?
Because that is what the vast majority of computers are being used for even in the commercial sector. Computer hardware peaked for the average user around 2000. Now as the article points out we are sitting around waiting for better software*. AMD would be better off developing that software then pushing hardware for a need that mostly doesn't exist.
* Why is it that stuff like user agents and other forms of AI mostly disappeared from the scene in the 90's? We have the power now to run the things that everyone seemed to be working on back then.
I thought most Slashdotters had a basic understanding of science? Non-ionising radiation is basically all the same. It doesn't matter if it comes from the magnetron in a microwave oven or your Wi-Fi AP. The only issue as to whether it will cook you is the power you absorb. Microwave ovens tend to run in the range of 500-1000+ watts of power, your AP probably puts out below 5 watts. It doesn't take much to figure out that minor and completely safe levels of leakage from the microwave will heavily interfere with Wi-Fi.
Of course I have actually had RF burns from playing with radios so I am not terrified of non-ionising radiation like luddites are.
The real issue with GM crops is patents. If you grow non-GM crops and your neighbour puts in GM crops will you better start paying that rent money to Monsanto because your crops will be contaminated with GM plants in short order and due to retarded IP laws you will be liable for this "patent infringement".
If Monsanto and the like gets their way every single farmer will be paying monopoly rents due to the fact that cross pollination and wind blown seeds can not be contained. Patent laws are not designed to be applied where "infringement" can happen without human intervention.
Just because it is standard practice doesn't change the fucking point.
Seizing and auctioning of property by law enforcement ON THE MERE SUSPICION* of it being connected with crime is absolutely intended to render certain people as non-persons (aka people without fundamental rights).
Ted Kaczynski is fucking crazy but that doesn't mean his personal property should be allowed to be seized and sold. Seized for the purpose of investigation is entirely different.
* If the police in most of the English speaking world decide some asset was bought with the proceeds of crime it is up to the, former, owner to prove this isn't true. This is the reason the "war on drugs" has overwhelming law enforcement support, it gives them carte blanche to intimidate people by threatening seizure.
That is "soft-off". ie you are asking politely for some IC some where to allow you to turn the device off. If the device has locked up this probably won't work*.
And with the amount of devices that don't really turn off** when you "turn them off" these days soft-off only gets really annoying.
* PC style architecture where the OS handles single press and the independent PSU handles press-and-hold is sadly a rarity these days.
** Hand held radio with soft-off, battery drained after two weeks "off". Hand held oscilloscope, battery fine after a month off.
China is run by the Chinese Communist Party but these days that is about as Communist as the National Socialist party was Socialist.
As mentioned earlier in the thread "safe" limits for ionising radiation don't exist. One single particle could be the one that hits a critical bit of DNA and gives you lethal cancer, or a billion particles could pass right through you and cause no damage. The "safety" limits set by government bodies are based on poor science and are complete bullshit.
Oh and also ALL food has radioactive particles. It did before atmospheric nuclear testing, and it especially does after all the atmospheric testing that went on. The fact is that unless a piece of food is INCREDIBLY contaminated it is no more a risk then the thousands of risky things we humans do every day and don't even think about.
Those who die from cancer caused by this leak will be out weighed a thousand times by those who die in car accidents, easily preventable infectious disease, and diet related disease. Let alone minor stuff like carcinogenic fumes released from the plastic that most Japanese homes are packed full of.
Spending hundreds of dollars (probably closer to a thousand in the current panic) on a radiation detector and then continuing to drive a car is the sign of an irrational person with no capacity for risk assessment.