SPDY is also non-standardized and Google keeps changing the details. Basically, the standard is however Google's implementations happen to behave, and only the client side of them is open. The Firefox developers are working on an implementation but kept running into issues because of this.
PPAPI is, as I understand it, the Chrome-specific plugin API that's implemented by NaCl applications; NaCl itself is integrated into the browser. (I believe they're planning on migrating everything across and dropping support of NPAPI at which point Chromium users will be even more screwed than currently because the version of the Flash plugin that ships with Google Chrome isn't available to anyone using Chromium. Their Google Chrome-only PDF reader plugin already uses PPAPI incidentally.)
And to tie back to cars again, governments will eventually mandate tracking devices in cars for charging a per kilometer/mile tax and mandate automated speed limiting will be enforced.
I think Doctorow saw this as something which would play a part in the war on general-purpose computing, actually - you wouldn't want people tampering with the computers in their cars to avoid the tracking and monitoring and speed limiting...
There's nothing legal or technical preventing someone from buying a handful chips from any of a half-dozen ARM licensees and fabricating the rest of a system around it
Yet. What happens if it does become illegal, though?
So basically, it's the party of the 1%, or maybe even the 0.1%? Because of course the existing parties haven't been good enough to Wall Street already...
The trouble with your kind of moderates is that they're vulnerable to parties that do what the Republicans have - dig in, refuse to compromise, and move further away from the mainstream dragging the middle point with them.
So apart from the fact they're walled gardens, each implement a different subset of the standard that corresponds to whatever actual underlying protocol they use, and (in the case of MSN and Facebook) have their own authentication system that no-one else uses, in theory with a good wind behind you they can actually be connected to with some of the same code.
Widespread meat-eating just makes it less able to support them, though - the feedstuffs for the animals has to come from somewhere, meaning that they get farmed and have fertilizer and pesticides dumped on them, and a lot of the energy in those feedstuffs is wasted making meat a very inefficient source of food.
Unfortunately, it doesn't look like the EU sees things this way. One of the Microsoft subsidiaries that provides Bing with targetted shopping results integrated into the main search submitted an anti-trust complaint about Google doing the same thing with their shopping results, and the EU are taking it seriously, which means that in the name of enforcing anti-competition laws soon Microsoft may become the only company allowed to integrate this kind of context-specific search with web searching.
Most likely, Google created Chrome and its specific features to push the browser market in a direction that favored web-based replacements for desktop application
Not just that, but they've been pushing web-based replacements for desktop applications that are Chrome-only, like the HTML5 version of Angry Birds and pretty much the entirety of NaCl.
I'm not sure how much of JavaScriptCore Google actually uses in Chrome now that they've got their own BSD-licensed V8 javascript engine. That leaves WebCore, which basically corresponds to the parts that originally came from KHTML - both Apple and Google have licensed as little as possible under the LGPL.
They've already done exactly this, though. Ask anyone living in Iran or Cuba. Worse still, it even affects open-source software - Sourceforge (which is owned by the same company as/.) blocks all downloads from countries that the US government has chosen to embargo.
The first x86 processor, the 8086, only had 29,000 transistors total, whereas this new chip uses over 34,000 times that many (a billion) just for DRAM, so how much complexity can x86 really be adding?
The 8086 was a 16-bit processor that could only address 1 MB of RAM (split up into 64k segments) with no support for virtual memory, didn't have any floating point hardware let alone stuff like SSE, and took an awfully large numbers of clock cycles to execute each instruction by modern standards. If you want something capable of actually running modern applications, you're looking at a lot more complexity.
Well, given that they represented it as being the BLS figures and the labels match the BLS figures, I'd say they weren't and they just moved the points on the graph around as a subtle way of lying about what the statistics actually say.
The reason that Python is the introductory language at MIT is probably the same as why ML was (is?) the introductory language at Cambridge.
Well, Cambridge University here in England actually used to recommend to Computer Science applicants that they should familiarize themselves with programming through Python if they hadn't already, presumably because they considered it a good beginner's language.
What happens when whatever you're trying to do exceeds the functionality that your "easy to use" development platform chose to expose? If you don't have a way to access the full underlying native APIs, you either have to give up altogether or start from scratch with native code.
Some or all of the newer nuclear technologies probably have their own safety problems; we generally don't seem to find out until they're actually tested and those ones haven't been. Look at pebble-bed reactors for example - absolute nightmare.
Does this include deaths related from dam failures of hydroelectric dams that were designed largely for flood control as a result of a combination of shoddy construction and once-in-2000-years flooding? Including deaths that would have resulted anyway from the once-in-2000-years flood itself even without a dam? I have a feeling they do based on past experience...
The trouble is, some of the commonly-used sources are... misleading. They do things like report radioactive emissions from coal plants and pollution-related deaths based on unfiltered stacks that are illegal now.
Already knew that, though to be honest shadowstats.com is probably even worse; they have a noticeable political bias and don't seem to release any methodological information, whereas at least we know how the Government is fiddling their figures. Fox News went beyond merely lying with statistics anyway - they were effectively lying about what the statistics were by mangling the graph that badly.
Bitcoin is digital, with all the qualities of information that make information non scarce.
Except that the creator of Bitcoin artificially added scarcity: there will only ever be 21 million bitcoins created. Which is part of the reason we're seeing all this hoarding and speculation, and indeed probably an important aspect of why Bitcoin has got so much attention; the limited amount of coins appeals to a certain fairly common kind of libertarian geek.
Slashdot Mirror
SPDY is also non-standardized and Google keeps changing the details. Basically, the standard is however Google's implementations happen to behave, and only the client side of them is open. The Firefox developers are working on an implementation but kept running into issues because of this.
PPAPI is, as I understand it, the Chrome-specific plugin API that's implemented by NaCl applications; NaCl itself is integrated into the browser. (I believe they're planning on migrating everything across and dropping support of NPAPI at which point Chromium users will be even more screwed than currently because the version of the Flash plugin that ships with Google Chrome isn't available to anyone using Chromium. Their Google Chrome-only PDF reader plugin already uses PPAPI incidentally.)
NaCl is secure
It's so secure that by default Google Chrome only uses it to execute code that's from trusted sources, more specifically from their app store.
And to tie back to cars again, governments will eventually mandate tracking devices in cars for charging a per kilometer/mile tax and mandate automated speed limiting will be enforced.
I think Doctorow saw this as something which would play a part in the war on general-purpose computing, actually - you wouldn't want people tampering with the computers in their cars to avoid the tracking and monitoring and speed limiting...
There's nothing legal or technical preventing someone from buying a handful chips from any of a half-dozen ARM licensees and fabricating the rest of a system around it
Yet. What happens if it does become illegal, though?
So basically, it's the party of the 1%, or maybe even the 0.1%? Because of course the existing parties haven't been good enough to Wall Street already...
The trouble with your kind of moderates is that they're vulnerable to parties that do what the Republicans have - dig in, refuse to compromise, and move further away from the mainstream dragging the middle point with them.
Of course, I've heard Churchill was also a big supporter of eugenics so I'm not sure I'd entirely trust his opinion.
So apart from the fact they're walled gardens, each implement a different subset of the standard that corresponds to whatever actual underlying protocol they use, and (in the case of MSN and Facebook) have their own authentication system that no-one else uses, in theory with a good wind behind you they can actually be connected to with some of the same code.
Widespread meat-eating just makes it less able to support them, though - the feedstuffs for the animals has to come from somewhere, meaning that they get farmed and have fertilizer and pesticides dumped on them, and a lot of the energy in those feedstuffs is wasted making meat a very inefficient source of food.
Unfortunately, it doesn't look like the EU sees things this way. One of the Microsoft subsidiaries that provides Bing with targetted shopping results integrated into the main search submitted an anti-trust complaint about Google doing the same thing with their shopping results, and the EU are taking it seriously, which means that in the name of enforcing anti-competition laws soon Microsoft may become the only company allowed to integrate this kind of context-specific search with web searching.
Most likely, Google created Chrome and its specific features to push the browser market in a direction that favored web-based replacements for desktop application
Not just that, but they've been pushing web-based replacements for desktop applications that are Chrome-only, like the HTML5 version of Angry Birds and pretty much the entirety of NaCl.
I'm not sure how much of JavaScriptCore Google actually uses in Chrome now that they've got their own BSD-licensed V8 javascript engine. That leaves WebCore, which basically corresponds to the parts that originally came from KHTML - both Apple and Google have licensed as little as possible under the LGPL.
They've already done exactly this, though. Ask anyone living in Iran or Cuba. Worse still, it even affects open-source software - Sourceforge (which is owned by the same company as /.) blocks all downloads from countries that the US government has chosen to embargo.
I'm using Chromium, but you're right - it is basically a crippled version of Chrome.
The first x86 processor, the 8086, only had 29,000 transistors total, whereas this new chip uses over 34,000 times that many (a billion) just for DRAM, so how much complexity can x86 really be adding?
The 8086 was a 16-bit processor that could only address 1 MB of RAM (split up into 64k segments) with no support for virtual memory, didn't have any floating point hardware let alone stuff like SSE, and took an awfully large numbers of clock cycles to execute each instruction by modern standards. If you want something capable of actually running modern applications, you're looking at a lot more complexity.
Well, given that they represented it as being the BLS figures and the labels match the BLS figures, I'd say they weren't and they just moved the points on the graph around as a subtle way of lying about what the statistics actually say.
The reason that Python is the introductory language at MIT is probably the same as why ML was (is?) the introductory language at Cambridge.
Well, Cambridge University here in England actually used to recommend to Computer Science applicants that they should familiarize themselves with programming through Python if they hadn't already, presumably because they considered it a good beginner's language.
What happens when whatever you're trying to do exceeds the functionality that your "easy to use" development platform chose to expose? If you don't have a way to access the full underlying native APIs, you either have to give up altogether or start from scratch with native code.
Some or all of the newer nuclear technologies probably have their own safety problems; we generally don't seem to find out until they're actually tested and those ones haven't been. Look at pebble-bed reactors for example - absolute nightmare.
Hydro is a bit more than twice that
Does this include deaths related from dam failures of hydroelectric dams that were designed largely for flood control as a result of a combination of shoddy construction and once-in-2000-years flooding? Including deaths that would have resulted anyway from the once-in-2000-years flood itself even without a dam? I have a feeling they do based on past experience...
The trouble is, some of the commonly-used sources are... misleading. They do things like report radioactive emissions from coal plants and pollution-related deaths based on unfiltered stacks that are illegal now.
Already knew that, though to be honest shadowstats.com is probably even worse; they have a noticeable political bias and don't seem to release any methodological information, whereas at least we know how the Government is fiddling their figures. Fox News went beyond merely lying with statistics anyway - they were effectively lying about what the statistics were by mangling the graph that badly.
Bitcoin is digital, with all the qualities of information that make information non scarce.
Except that the creator of Bitcoin artificially added scarcity: there will only ever be 21 million bitcoins created. Which is part of the reason we're seeing all this hoarding and speculation, and indeed probably an important aspect of why Bitcoin has got so much attention; the limited amount of coins appeals to a certain fairly common kind of libertarian geek.
How do they hide the clouds of black smoke that used to be visible from the fields around town as stated in the article.
Probably in a different village that reporters don't have access to. That's the usual way of things.