Yep. What's really sad is that the police has been pushed by those in power to switch sides: from public servants to enemy of the people whom you have to protect yourself against nowadays. Can't we please get the original police back, you know, the helpful guys you call when you feel threatened by some real robber? Let those parasitic MAFIAA and their ilk employ and pay their own gang to enforce their grip on the populace and leave the regular police do its original job!
The Internet was designed with a very specific failure mode in mind: big cities and their switching centers being obliterated, i.e. nuked, and the need to route around the damage. The current failure mode, lawfare by all kinds of pressure and interest groups, is quite different in nature, and much more dangerous, IMHO. The research question is how well does the original design of the Internet adapt to this new kind of threat? TPB is currently testing the limits of hiding behind a distributed non-uniform legal system. As long as we don't have a world government under US, Saudi or whomever's thumb, there's a slim chance that TPB will survive longer by playing mouse against the MAFIAA's fat cats and their governmental peons. But when that happens -- and it's just a matter of time until it does --, will the Internet still be able to adapt to a globally hostile legal environment?
The fact that a tiny rich minority can literally buy laws makes said laws totally illegitimate in my eyes. They may be "legal" because they are laws, but are certainly illegitimate, as in "immoral", because they don't reflect the will of the people. And a political system that has allowed itself to be corrupted to the bone would do well to check out its legitimacy too, IMHO.
Exactly. But if you control the DNS of your domain, and have a backup hosting provider on hot standby, you could switch from BlueHost to that other provider very quickly.
I would even go further and say that all this CO2 discussion is merely hiding the fact that it's about saving energy. No more, no less. The CO2 discussion, especially in Europe, is bordering on the religious and mystical, that's why regulators keep using it as an easy way to manipulate people. The real reason is to reduce the dependency on Oil... which is an excellent reason by itself, seeing how politically unstable the whole Middle East is.
That's not what OP meant. It's the idle power that devices consume when they are in stand-by mode. Think TV sets that are "off", but actually happily sucking 12W; devices that are supposed to be off, but whose wall warts also draw 12W idle, just to be ready to restart etc... All this idle power goes down the drain without any kind of benefit. New stand-by electronics are capable of drawing less than 0.5 W when idle. This is what the EU is actually making mandatory.
This. And since electricity is becoming increasingly expensive in Europe (and elsewhere except perhaps for the US, judging from the majority of comments here), consumers are getting more and more price-sensitive to it, and start looking for more energy-efficient gear. Of course, it's not the oddball discrete GPU that drives power consumption through the roof, it's old refrigerators, inefficient 12W stand-by circuits running 24/7 etc. That's more important to get rid off than a GPU.
You must not be living in Germany then, since you didn't experience GEMA's talibanesque crusade against "public performance of music." At least in the US, they have Fair Use provisions. Europe doesn't have them, AFAIK. In a sense, copyright-wise, European legislation is even worse than the dismal US copyright legislation.
That seems like a LOT more of a pain in the butt than simply turning off the secure boot option.
How long will motherboard BIOSes ship with the option to turn off UEFI secure boot? Maybe not tomorrow, but what about 1, 2 or 3 years down the road? That's the real issue here! The problem is that the PC commodity market is about to be turned into a walled garden controlled by, guess who? Microsoft in this case. That's pretty scary stuff actually, and I wouldn't wonder if the regulating authorities (at least in the EU) will sooner or later consider this as anti-competitive behavior.
Let's set the standard: public disorder - destroying property, killing people - is a crime. Freedom of expression is not.
But there ain't no Universal Law that all countries agree on! What is a crime and what is not varies heavily from legislation to legislation. Freedom of expression isn't a crime where we are, while copyright infringement is a heavy crime or will soon be. In other places, it's the other way around. That's the reason why international bodies like the UN shouldn't interfere with internal matters of their members. It's simply not their business.
I couldn't agree more. But we're actively helping Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Qatar & Co. to establish similarly minded (islamist) regimes in Libya, Syria et al. (yes, we do, despite talks to the contrary). So let's not be too arrogant here. We're sleeping with dogs for quite some time, we shouldn't complain of the fleas now.
Seriously. There's a strong need for security experts with the skill set to code rootkits and similar anti-forensic software. A book like this will help you get started with the basics.
Yes, embedded software is one way to go. There are still many opportunities for coders in VHDL and Verilog for designing FPGAs and ASICs, and C for applications running on top of this.
Exactly. What good is a binary blob for a specific version of the Linux kernel, when you need to run this piece of hardware on another incompatible version, on another architecture, or, say, on another open sourced OS like, say, FreeBSD? We don't need vendor lock-in through binary blobs; Open Specs is what we need. Support can then be provided by volunteers.
There's no compelling reason to upgrade to Windows 8, but unlike Vista, there's no reason to actively avoid it.
Sorry, but IMHO Windows 7 is esthetically much more pleasing to the eye than Windows 8 (Metro, Modern, or whatever they call this abomination of an UI today). As a Unix person for more than 30 years, I'm probably too old to like a cell phone UI on a desktop computer or to adapt to it without pain and a lot of inner flinching. If a future incarnation of Windows had the option of switching themes and UIs, I may reconsider. But Windows 8 as it is now? Thanks, but no thanks. I'll actively avoid this.
Democracy is merely the rule of the uneducated masses. Nuances don't matter; the system itself is deeply flawed, if the majority is mostly ignorant and/or superstitious. Just look at the so called "Arab Spring": what do you think uneducated people there vote for, when given a chance? They vote for the very same religious nuts as the people in Georgia who voted for this representative. Maybe, just maybe, democracy is not such a good idea, when you can't count on the majority to be more or less sane and grown up intellectually?
Is there really a viable market for specialised CPUs?
Last time I've used them, SPARCs were general purpose CPUs... and pretty good ones at that. But yes, there's a market for that. For instance, Fujitsu SPARC64 CPUs are currently being used, among others, in the HPC world for massively parallel simulations.
Japan, The Philippines, etc... are testing grounds for the global MAFIAA. That's where they drop their legal bombs and observe how far they can take the general populace. Should they succeed there, they'll implement the same laws elsewhere.
In the IT sector, excellent employees are usually self-motivated and burn for their job with a passion... until they burn out due to persistently poor management. If you need external incentives for them, you're probably doing something wrong... as in: their work environment isn't adapted to their needs, hindering them to deploy their whole creative potential. In this case, you only have two options: throw in additional tasks that appeal to their internal intellectual drive and combine them with the mission critical stuff (i.e. make it more interesting for them); or fire them or let them go, and hire other people.
t's very important for Muslims across the world to understand that he was NOT arrested and jailed for the CONTENT of that movie, but because he continually provided false aliases to the judge and the police in violation of his probation.
Don't worry: Muslims with a brain will understand this perfectly. And those without a brain (i.e. the violent rioters) will think that Obama had arrested this guy for his film... and stop rioting as a result. So what? As long as the rioters crawl back under the stone they emerged from, and calm is restored, everything is okay, operationally speaking. What do WE care that the reason they calmed down was flawed? It doesn't matter one tiny bit.
I hate repeating myself, but what's this craze to attribute someone with such a reputation as Peter Norvig merely to his current employer? He's much more than a mere Google employee, IMHO. Can't we credit people with their real achievements instead of their employers?
Well, I could imagine that he'll support efforts to establish unrestricted municipal WLAN access points. But seriously, how about typical "piratic" topics like pushing for transparency in governance at the municipal level?
I couldn't agree more. This is absolutely not a matter of CISC (-frontend with a RISC backend) vs. RISC; it's about Intel (and AMD?) withholding hardware specifications of a particular subsystem of their new chips. That's not a technological issue, it is a purely economic/political... and maybe even legal one in some parts of the world (antitrust behavior, anybody?).
IMHO, it looks and smells like MSFT having signed a deal with Intel and AMD to lock down the x86 tablet platform to Win8. This complements nicely the UEFI lockdown on ARM tablets they have signed with hardware manufacturers with Win8 offerings. Nothing really surprising.
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Yep. What's really sad is that the police has been pushed by those in power to switch sides: from public servants to enemy of the people whom you have to protect yourself against nowadays. Can't we please get the original police back, you know, the helpful guys you call when you feel threatened by some real robber? Let those parasitic MAFIAA and their ilk employ and pay their own gang to enforce their grip on the populace and leave the regular police do its original job!
The Internet was designed with a very specific failure mode in mind: big cities and their switching centers being obliterated, i.e. nuked, and the need to route around the damage. The current failure mode, lawfare by all kinds of pressure and interest groups, is quite different in nature, and much more dangerous, IMHO. The research question is how well does the original design of the Internet adapt to this new kind of threat? TPB is currently testing the limits of hiding behind a distributed non-uniform legal system. As long as we don't have a world government under US, Saudi or whomever's thumb, there's a slim chance that TPB will survive longer by playing mouse against the MAFIAA's fat cats and their governmental peons. But when that happens -- and it's just a matter of time until it does --, will the Internet still be able to adapt to a globally hostile legal environment?
The fact that a tiny rich minority can literally buy laws makes said laws totally illegitimate in my eyes. They may be "legal" because they are laws, but are certainly illegitimate, as in "immoral", because they don't reflect the will of the people. And a political system that has allowed itself to be corrupted to the bone would do well to check out its legitimacy too, IMHO.
Exactly. But if you control the DNS of your domain, and have a backup hosting provider on hot standby, you could switch from BlueHost to that other provider very quickly.
I would even go further and say that all this CO2 discussion is merely hiding the fact that it's about saving energy. No more, no less. The CO2 discussion, especially in Europe, is bordering on the religious and mystical, that's why regulators keep using it as an easy way to manipulate people. The real reason is to reduce the dependency on Oil... which is an excellent reason by itself, seeing how politically unstable the whole Middle East is.
That's not what OP meant. It's the idle power that devices consume when they are in stand-by mode. Think TV sets that are "off", but actually happily sucking 12W; devices that are supposed to be off, but whose wall warts also draw 12W idle, just to be ready to restart etc... All this idle power goes down the drain without any kind of benefit. New stand-by electronics are capable of drawing less than 0.5 W when idle. This is what the EU is actually making mandatory.
This. And since electricity is becoming increasingly expensive in Europe (and elsewhere except perhaps for the US, judging from the majority of comments here), consumers are getting more and more price-sensitive to it, and start looking for more energy-efficient gear. Of course, it's not the oddball discrete GPU that drives power consumption through the roof, it's old refrigerators, inefficient 12W stand-by circuits running 24/7 etc. That's more important to get rid off than a GPU.
You must not be living in Germany then, since you didn't experience GEMA's talibanesque crusade against "public performance of music." At least in the US, they have Fair Use provisions. Europe doesn't have them, AFAIK. In a sense, copyright-wise, European legislation is even worse than the dismal US copyright legislation.
How long will motherboard BIOSes ship with the option to turn off UEFI secure boot? Maybe not tomorrow, but what about 1, 2 or 3 years down the road? That's the real issue here! The problem is that the PC commodity market is about to be turned into a walled garden controlled by, guess who? Microsoft in this case. That's pretty scary stuff actually, and I wouldn't wonder if the regulating authorities (at least in the EU) will sooner or later consider this as anti-competitive behavior.
But there ain't no Universal Law that all countries agree on! What is a crime and what is not varies heavily from legislation to legislation. Freedom of expression isn't a crime where we are, while copyright infringement is a heavy crime or will soon be. In other places, it's the other way around. That's the reason why international bodies like the UN shouldn't interfere with internal matters of their members. It's simply not their business.
I couldn't agree more. But we're actively helping Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Qatar & Co. to establish similarly minded (islamist) regimes in Libya, Syria et al. (yes, we do, despite talks to the contrary). So let's not be too arrogant here. We're sleeping with dogs for quite some time, we shouldn't complain of the fleas now.
Seriously. There's a strong need for security experts with the skill set to code rootkits and similar anti-forensic software. A book like this will help you get started with the basics.
Yes, embedded software is one way to go. There are still many opportunities for coders in VHDL and Verilog for designing FPGAs and ASICs, and C for applications running on top of this.
Exactly. What good is a binary blob for a specific version of the Linux kernel, when you need to run this piece of hardware on another incompatible version, on another architecture, or, say, on another open sourced OS like, say, FreeBSD? We don't need vendor lock-in through binary blobs; Open Specs is what we need. Support can then be provided by volunteers.
Sorry, but IMHO Windows 7 is esthetically much more pleasing to the eye than Windows 8 (Metro, Modern, or whatever they call this abomination of an UI today). As a Unix person for more than 30 years, I'm probably too old to like a cell phone UI on a desktop computer or to adapt to it without pain and a lot of inner flinching. If a future incarnation of Windows had the option of switching themes and UIs, I may reconsider. But Windows 8 as it is now? Thanks, but no thanks. I'll actively avoid this.
Democracy is merely the rule of the uneducated masses. Nuances don't matter; the system itself is deeply flawed, if the majority is mostly ignorant and/or superstitious. Just look at the so called "Arab Spring": what do you think uneducated people there vote for, when given a chance? They vote for the very same religious nuts as the people in Georgia who voted for this representative. Maybe, just maybe, democracy is not such a good idea, when you can't count on the majority to be more or less sane and grown up intellectually?
Last time I've used them, SPARCs were general purpose CPUs... and pretty good ones at that. But yes, there's a market for that. For instance, Fujitsu SPARC64 CPUs are currently being used, among others, in the HPC world for massively parallel simulations.
Japan, The Philippines, etc... are testing grounds for the global MAFIAA. That's where they drop their legal bombs and observe how far they can take the general populace. Should they succeed there, they'll implement the same laws elsewhere.
In the IT sector, excellent employees are usually self-motivated and burn for their job with a passion... until they burn out due to persistently poor management. If you need external incentives for them, you're probably doing something wrong... as in: their work environment isn't adapted to their needs, hindering them to deploy their whole creative potential. In this case, you only have two options: throw in additional tasks that appeal to their internal intellectual drive and combine them with the mission critical stuff (i.e. make it more interesting for them); or fire them or let them go, and hire other people.
Don't worry: Muslims with a brain will understand this perfectly. And those without a brain (i.e. the violent rioters) will think that Obama had arrested this guy for his film... and stop rioting as a result. So what? As long as the rioters crawl back under the stone they emerged from, and calm is restored, everything is okay, operationally speaking. What do WE care that the reason they calmed down was flawed? It doesn't matter one tiny bit.
I hate repeating myself, but what's this craze to attribute someone with such a reputation as Peter Norvig merely to his current employer? He's much more than a mere Google employee, IMHO. Can't we credit people with their real achievements instead of their employers?
Which was precisely the point of the drill, wasn't it? Legalities matter little to those in power: results do.
Well, I could imagine that he'll support efforts to establish unrestricted municipal WLAN access points. But seriously, how about typical "piratic" topics like pushing for transparency in governance at the municipal level?
There are already passive radars out there that can detect this kind of stealth plane.
IMHO, it looks and smells like MSFT having signed a deal with Intel and AMD to lock down the x86 tablet platform to Win8. This complements nicely the UEFI lockdown on ARM tablets they have signed with hardware manufacturers with Win8 offerings. Nothing really surprising.