See my comment elsewhere in this thread. The earth is only a very small part of the moon hemisphere. It's effectively a little less than three times as big "in the moon sky" and the rest of the hemisphere. It is actually about four times as big, but to make it easier, I'm also including the half of the hemisphere you can't see in the comparison how much it would shield you.
It's like saying a thousand people throwing pebbles at you simultaneously have less chance hitting your body because you are holding up a tennis ball. Maybe a few will miss you because their pebble will bounce off the tennis ball, but almost all will get through.
The chance of any object large enough to leave a crater visible from earth on the moon being shielded by earth, is very small. While the earth is roughly four times the diameter of the moon, it's at such a distance that it covers a very small part of the total area from which objects from space will hit it.
Just look at the sky at night at a full moon. Calculate roughly how much area the moon covers if it's high up in the sky and multiply the surface area by 8 (4^2 then divide that number by two because you only see half the hemisphere, high up in the sky because the atmosphere makes objects appear larger if they are close to the horizon). It may be easier to imagine the moon about 2.82 times the diameter it is to get to that size. Now picture yourself standing under an umbrella that size, pointed in any random direction and have a thousand people throwing rocks at you from all directions and all distances. How big is the chance that they'd miss because the umbrella would shield you?
You could do the actual math and not do a quick guesstimate like I just did to come up with the exact amount of hemisphere that would be shielded by earth from the moon and come up with a low percentage number. That would still not be the percentage of shielding that you'd get from earth, since the gravitational field will pull in stuff that would be in a trajectory to just pass earth. Some of it will crash on earth as a result of that, some of it will deflect the path such that it may just miss the moon and some of it will pull stuff in a trajectory that will hit the moon while it wouldn't have otherwise. Still, the amount of hemisphere being influenced positively or negatively by this field would be rather small, most of the rocks would just get through regardless.
The big thing shielding both earth and the moon currently are actually the bigger planets further out in our solar system. The main reason we don't get a lot of large objects hitting us is because most stuff getting into our solar system will start being in pulled slowly from outer belts of debris and intersect with one of the big planets gravity fields before they'd even get close. Most of the moon craters we see from here were formed long ago, when there way way more stuff flying around in our solar system, especially just after the crash that triggered the inception of the moon and it just had gotten it's shape. Earth has an atmosphere and tectonics that made any old craters disappear, the moon has kept them since it's inception.
Consumer cars usually have either a metal or a glass-fiber-reinforced PVC tank hidden away in the the frame of the car, just above or behind the rear axle. The GFR tanks have flame retarders in the plastic and are easily as thick as 1/4th inch.Even after Ralph Nadar did his famous "unsafe at any speed" these tanks do get punctured and car fires do occur. Especially when someone gets rear ended, fires way too often start from short circuit under the hood of the rear vehicle, setting the gasoline from the split open tank of the front vehicle on fire. Metal tanks are usually made of thin steel plate, not aluminum and only mounted on cheap consumer cars with bad general safety ratings, or older cars that are usually very unsafe compared to new modern cars anyway.
Gas tanks need armor too to protect them from puncturing. They are just usually not located in a position where the chance that road debris will puncture them directly, but there are plenty of other scenarios where they still get punctured. not only that, gas tanks have thin, vulnerable fuel lines running along the bottom of your car to the front, while Tesla has the power lines shielded way more efficiently. It may not directly set your car ablaze if you cut a fuel line, but it will 50% chance stop your car immediately, or otherwise you won't be able to drive for more than 15 minutes or so before you have dumped all the fuel on the road. If for some reason the leaking fuel were to ignite, you'd be in a whole lot more trouble with that than you'd be with a punctured cell in a Tesla. Imagine the whole bottom of your car sprayed with fuel and set on fire, directing the flames onto your fuel tank with you sitting in the car driving along; without getting a warning until it gets really hot or you see the smoke or flames in your rear view mirror. The moment you stop, flames will be up on all sides of the car making you have to go through fire to get out of the car.
Apart from the fuel tanks getting punctured in accidents, fuel lines often break from the fuel pressure alone during regular driving. These fuel line leaks start under hood fires that can't be put out by the time people notice and stop the car on the road. Most modern cars have no or nearly no rubber fuel lines anymore, but older models have plenty of rubber hoses that dry out and deteriorate with age. Adding ethanol to gasoline has not helped this problem, since it accelerates the aging of these hoses. Many cars spontaneously burn out because of this on a daily basis.
Fuel powered cars have plenty of electric fires as well. Everyone you ask knows several cases that didn't even make the news of cars spontaneously bursting into flames in the driveway or while driving because of a short circuit. Some make the news if it was a slow news day or traffic was impeded because of the fire, but most just go by without any media attention whatsoever. This is not counting the numerous times something like this happens because people added accessories themselves, or some dimwit tried to jump someone elses car and shorted something out with a big fat jumper cable.
If food an games aren't sufficient to keep your populace at bay, you'll use fear. Using fear has it's limitations, because once people will get hungry because you don't provide them with food, they will revolt. History has always proven this principle right and it will do so again. Over 40% of the USA citizens are around or below poverty rates and this number is still growing each year. Regardless of what political party is in control when that happens, there will be mass protests and plundering going on, just like in Egypt or any country where hunger and poverty is abundant and only a few rich people have control.
As if anyone can get 4G coverage long enough to actually put data over it at any interesting rates. You'd have to search for a location where your signal is strong enough so much, that you could just as well be looking for a wifi uplink that will cost nothing more than a cup of coffee at a starbucks or equivalent.
People get to keep their stoves. It's just that stoves that are sold new have to burn cleaner. It's not a witch hunt to find polluting stoves and have people freeze to death.
Yes, new stoves will probably start at a higher price point because of this. People building an open fire place in their new home will have trouble getting a permit for their building. That's about a far as this law will go.
People in rural communities might have to pay a bit more if they want to buy a new stove, but it will be less polluting and probably require less wood to burn to keep your home heated and your food cooked as a bonus. Yes, rural communities suffer pollution too. You may not be directly polluting breathing air for as many neighbours as in a city, but humans breathing particles aren't the only thing that suffer from the pollution. Also, these particles travel a long way, so just because someone isn't huffing on your chimney, doesn't mean they don't get to breathe what came out of it.
It's nice that NVidia is lowering their prices, but they are just not that competitive if you use these cards for password hashing or openCL. I had been using NVidia for the last 12, but I recently switched to an AMD card since at half the price, it was still faster at brute forcing crypto than the NVidia board was. I think NVidia should work on their openCL performance and AMD should work on the number of shaders and such on their chipsets.
It used to be that MicroSoft defeated WordPerfect and they had the only usable office suite available, running on what at least 95% of potentially paying customers had as their only means to do office stuff on.
These days, potentially paying customers use a plethora of devices, over half of which are totally not under control of MicroSoft, neither architecture or operating system, let alone business model. Many of these already offer quite capable alternatives to the MicroSoft office products, or free alternatives are readily available. With current document interoperability standards being forced by large groups of customers, vendor lock in using proprietary formats isn't much of an option for MicroSoft any more.
Office software suites haven't really changed much in the last 10 years or so. You can type a letter, make up a document in a unique way that almost totally not looks like it will come out of a printer in infinite ways, pivot your tables in a spreadsheet, hook it up to a database and make boring presentations with the same sort of spiffy animations that we stopped using long ago. It's a dead horse, there's nothing exciting to build left and even your fridge has an office suite available for it in some app store.
TL;DR, Office software is a hard market to compete in, even if you have a large user base. Betting the family fortune on maintaining that user base and milking lots of money out of them without having the benefits of alternative business models like google does, is at best a high risk bet and most likely a guarantee to fail.
I used to use Adobe software until very recently, because my main usage for graphics software was editing my own photographs. I take photos with a proper camera that will use a data format that has more than 8 bits per pixel and does not have lossy compression in the device. Fortunately, darkroom is now good enough to use so I won't have to. If I ever should want to "photoshop" my photos, fortunately Gimp will have RAW support in the next release. To be honest, I haven't looked at CMYK yet, but I really hope that it will have support for that too.
The arrogance that somehow millions of people that are actually prepared to pay for good software because it has features that FOSS doesn't have aren't potential users is really beyond my comprehension. Cost savings aren't just in a license fee, they are in the quality of the final product, fetching a better price, and in the time saved having a better work flow. Darktable has "just started" if you compare it to the time gimp has been around and already I see several serious photo enthusiast people use it for serious work. Since I've got it running with openCL, I haven't started Adobe Lightroom, even though Darktable is still in the "very active development" stage. Again, I don't know about CMYK since I'm not in the printing business, but given the amount of people forking out money to Adobe, I'm sure there will be plenty of shops willing to try Gimp and even donate if it will have proper CMYK and professional color profile support. Get of your high horse and start looking at improvements that will make the app better than what's available. Don't tell people they don't need it just because you yourself don't; it's degrading and makes FOSS look bad. FOSS has a good place in the server room and partially on mobile. The reason it hasn't on the desktop is partially because apps like this just aren't "the best you can get". Visicalc and WordPerfect sold millions of hardware+OS kits, just because of the one application, the rest was mediocre at best. Linux needs a few of those applications too to finally push Windows off it's pedestal.
If you recognize that you are in fact streaming video, you can buffer that video ahead and keep the rest of the display nice and interactive. There's no reason you can't divide the display you are remote serving into several sections and give them each their own update/caching/buffering strategies.
I'm sorry, but both your arguments don't make sense to me. Why would big pockets of closed software vendors make this initiative fail? Will they spend money on this platform to have developers focus on irrelevant features or "harmless" bugs? I can't think of any other way closed source vendors would be spending money on open source to make it worse.?
Honesty? What's dishonest about this? It's out in the open that people are willing to pay others to fix bugs in software. Either the maintainers of the open source package themselves step up and fix it and get paid, or some independent developer will. It may depend on their contributions being accepted by the maintainers, but I don't see anything hidden or dishonest about the process.
It may fail because people aren't willing to pay enough, or the initiative will remain too small to maintain, but I don't really see any other reasons why it would fail otherwise.
The city was functioning, but they couldn't change anything in their infrastructure. It was pretty nasty because from what I understand he locked everything up *after* he got in a conflict, but it wasn't shut down.
TFA claims "over 70 devices" but less than half of devices currently for sale from phone carriers or independent stores are supported by CM. There are vast numbers of Chinese tablets and phones that have no CM ported to them. In practice, "any Android device imaginable" boils down to "premium brand devices that have been abandoned by their vendors for major version updates". I like CM and it's spinoffs, it's very good for the ecosystem and it forces vendors to stay alert and keep supporting their hardware. However, claiming it has support for everything and the kitchen sink is just wrong and it may hurt it's credibility. Supporting over 70 devices is amazing, but it's not the over 1000 devices that are out there.
Apple started it. Android tablets had to be cheaper *and* faster to get a hold of that market. MicroSoft had both the OSes and multiple Android hardware vendors to deal with in an already well established market. They should have positioned their product against the top of Android at a price competing with the mid range of that tablet market.
Also, they shouldn't try and position a pimped up tablet that was too crippled to take on netbooks, notebooks or ultrabooks at a price point higher than these. If you're selling it as an ultrabook with detachable keyboard, make it like that. the notebook/laptop/ultrabook/netbook format machines have hinges for a reason. It means you can position your device on any three-point surface with the base and adjust the screen so that you can look at it semi-comfortably. A kick stand doesn't work that way, because you need a totally flat surface at the correct hight in order to make use of your device with such a contraption.
The sad part here is that the UI and the fact that you could use a lot of your code base for both desktop and portable device applications are lost because of these marketing decisions. If you ignore history and fanatic MicroSoft bashing and just look at the ergonomics of the tile interface and judge it by it's merits on a touch screen device, it's pretty good. The reason why Nokia's entry level phones are actually selling in Europe is not just because of the camera, the UI isn't half bad either and it's quite zippy on the lower spec hardware. For that money, you can't get an iPhone and the Android offerings at the same price point aren't stunning.
I think they would have actually had a chance and may still have if they would get their head unstuck from between their buttocks and would just start competing their devices at whatever point the market puts them. That may mean they'd lose on every device they were selling for a few years. They were willing to take that risk with the Xbox and it looks like they have a solid gaming division set up now. Sell the tablets as tablets, price them so people would buy the one that's "so much better than the ipad/android at the same price" and hook them into xbox live as a unique selling point. By crossing over xbox games onto the tablets, you can make people do parts of the games on their tablets. The dog in GTA5 is a very good example why this sort of thing works and MicroSoft would be stupid not to use their xbox customers to extend their tablet market.
Before you'll be calling me a fanboi, I'd much rather see good things happen to open source. Google has closed off most of Android apps, the kernel is totally forked from Linux and most hardware drivers are closed source. Even CyanogenMod has gone commercial now. I'm hoping one of the other Linux attempts at tablets or some *BSD attempt, will actually kick off and make a difference. The reason I am saying this is that even though I don't like MicroSofts business politics, I think the world would benefit from some good competition on the tablet market. MicroSoft genuinely has done quite a few things right, despite screwing up a lot of other things.
I really don't see myself running FreeBSD in a VM on my tablet. It'd be hell to control the GUI stuff, let alone do the keyboard input. Tablets are used mostly for consuming, not for development or simulation.
Others have said similar things already, but this will never work. Any tool that can be used to do something useful, can be used to harm someone else. That is true for most tools we humans use and also applies to most "cyber tools". Using a network scanner to find intruders or bad configured systems is good, using it to find someone that wants to get information out of a censored government is bad. Using a load tester to see if your system can handle the users it's designed for is good, but using it to take down some system that is run by someone you oppose of is bad.
She has no idea that the tools exclusively marketed as cyber weapons are nothing more than window dressing for existing things. Any government spending money on this either needs the window dressing and can't make their own, or is too stupid to understand this sort of thing. The more they spend money on cyber weapons, the less they will spend it on potentially more harmful things. Please let them be, it's a snake oil market and anyone buying the snake oil deserves what they get for their money.
There were things in the files he released that weren't crimes as long as you were looking at only the USA laws. Releasing those harmed USA spying efforts and as such, is treason and/or espionage. The fact that a significant part of these files revealed that the NSA were in fact breaking USA laws doesn't make the part that he released the rest of it go away.
Robin of Hood committed crimes, even if he gave the profits of those crimes to the poor. While I think the world is overall better off with Snowden doing what he did, that doesn't make these charges bogus all of a sudden. He did something unlawful, even if his intent was good. If you don't agree with this being unlawful, you should try and work on getting the laws changed.
Sorry, but I'd like to see at least some unsubstantiated arguments for your opinion. Proof of those would be even better, but this being slashdot, I'm not counting on much. A score 5 comment without anything but an opinion? C'mon mods, you're not even trying anymore....
Seriously, try working at that DPI all day and actually using that resolution. Your letters would be so small your eyes would get tired way before you reach the 8hrs. You can focus on a screen that close for a limited time only. To work comfortably on screens all day long, they need to be at least 60cm (2ft) from your eyes, making densities over 120 DPI useless for anyone that's not into graphics design.
Maybe you young whippersnapper can pull this off, but once you hit 30 or something, you won't. I'm over 40 and I don't need reading glasses or anything. My eyes still test so good, they need a manual device to test the limits, the computer ones are too slow to register because my eyes adapt faster than they can read them. Still, if I have to work all day on (small) high DPI screens driving home after work I notice I have trouble to focus quickly enough on things happening in traffic. It's not that it's dangerous or anything, but I have to get a lot closer to a sign before I can properly read it than I have to in the morning, or I will have to look at it so long that it will get dangerous if I do that while driving. I get more headaches and later in the day, I tend to not want to work on the computer anymore because I have trouble concentrating on what I read. At home, on my comfortable dual 30" 2560*1600 screens, I have no problem doing 10 hours of work on the same sort of things.
Having to work often at equipment provided by customers, I see a trend of making techies work on a high resolution laptop screen that's 15" or less, while it used to be that we got large dual screens made available to us. Not only do we seriously lack screen real estate in pixel count, we also don't get the font size required for comfortable and fast reading all day long. Stop the craze of insane DPIs and smaller screens and start focusing on ergonomics again. There's a reason we had these large screens in the past and that reason hasn't changed. It's called ergonomics and if you want people to perform, it's cheaper to give them a bit more tech than to throw infinite monkeys at a problem.
What makes me kind of sad is that most companies and governments never learn from lessons that the past have already taught us. It was obvious that connecting so many different vendors through one web site was going to be a pain unless some communication protocol was established as a standard. What if this sort of thing, after being established, was thoroughly tested before a universal front end was created? However obvious this was, it didn't happen for the usual reasons; politics, delegation of blame, responsibilities and the usual unclear communication.
(grumpy old man voice) If we were ate war and the military was responsible for this, they would have gotten this sorted out in 24 hours! If only lives would depend on it, things would have gone so much smoother! Oh wait....
1. They try to infect other machines. They seem to use several methods for this. One is infecting USB sticks and other media. They have been observed abusing an old windows exploit that uses true type fonts as the vector for that.
2. They are trying to communicate with other infected machines. They use some rather inventive carriers for that it seems. One of these appears to be sound. How it works isn't published yet. Another seems to be to use out-of-band communication by putting data inside host-option packets in DHCP. It's obvious that the malware uses such side channels to avoid detection. The OOB communication is done purely to keep in touch with "the swarm" and is not used to infect other machines.
The real nastiness appears to be that this malware is able to infect multiple operating systems that are usually passed by malware manufacturers and also happens to be able to nest itself on the eeprom of infected machines. Both are more or less "a first" and the combination hasn't been seen in the wild either.
Right now, there's a lot of discovery being done and a lot of speculation taking place as to who made it, what it can do, how it gets itself in eeprom and prevents itself from being overwritten during reflashing of the bios. It's not known if the virus will attempt to infect virtual machines, or will only infect machines that will let it nest in it's bios. Also, anything malicious apart from infecting and communicating hasn't been observed. For all we know, it may be a true worm that does nothing but replicate and is an out of control experiment.
So far, no infections appear to have been seen on virtual machines, or machines that don't have an intel chipset. I haven't seen any linux infected machines mentioned, but don't hold your breath on that, if *BSD and OSX have been infected, Linux may very well be infected too. Windows is infected for certain, but what versions are exactly vulnerable isn't clear to me at this time.
Thus far, the only thing that can be advised to prevent infection is the usual; don't trust content/media from sources that could be spreading infections, knowingly or not and keep your system up to date. If applicable, set your bios read-only with hardware switches or jumpers and if at all possible, put passwords on bioses and put software blocks on updates as well. To this date it's not known if and what software blocks will prevent the malware, but it's best to give it as few attack surfaces as possible.
In Euro land, you either pay with your debit card, or you pay cash. If you pay cash, the cashier usually either just puts the bills in the register, or they do a check in a standalone machine to see if the machine approves of the currency. Registers that count money and have a built in validator are rare and only now are starting to appear in bigger supermarkets.
Crooks here in Europe are very good at firmware updates or hardware modification on POS type equipment. Until very recently our omnipresent debit cards used a magnet strip and a pin code for payments. It got to be a weekly news item that such and such store or popular gas station had their PIN terminals skimmed and thousands of customers had their bank accounts cleaned out with copied cards and "recorded" PIN numbers. Cards still occasionally get skimmed, but debit cards are usually blocked by default outside the EU and inside the EU you need a smart card to make PIN payments. Skimmers can't copy the smart chip of the debit card, so they can't use the card unless they steal the physical item. This leaves the success rate of skimming a magnet strip+pin to the rare cards that are unblocked for outside of the EU and it requires accomplices in for instance India or so to clean out the accounts of the cards you swiped. Until someone finds a nice attack on the smart cards (I don't think it will take long, cell phone SIM cards have been hacked too), we won't be seeing them attack electronic payments in brick and mortar stores on a large scale soon. They will most likely move their game towards getting their own fake currency accepted by the validators and start buying small items with large bills, or resell the items to replace the "loss of income" since skimming debit cards wasn't profitable any more.
TL;DR In Europe firmware mods are the most successful mods for this sort of hack/fraud.
Google is getting pretty obnoxious. They want you to use your real name, merge all your accounts, get google+ and "add accounts" to gmail in the web interface. Really, if I wanted to do that, I'd do it myself. I can't switch it off and instead of just fast and easy access to the application I am/was used to I keep on getting confronted with constantly changing interfaces, nags about merging stuff, getting accounts on stuff I refuse to use and whatnot. Handing over your mail so they could profile you is bad enough, but at least you got a relatively trouble free service for it in return. They've turned into the thing that made people flee to them, and people will flee away. Once I get proper backups sorted, I'll run my mail on my own servers again and use a bunch of sock puppet accounts to do my searching and all that. Screw you Google, I'm going home.
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See my comment elsewhere in this thread. The earth is only a very small part of the moon hemisphere. It's effectively a little less than three times as big "in the moon sky" and the rest of the hemisphere. It is actually about four times as big, but to make it easier, I'm also including the half of the hemisphere you can't see in the comparison how much it would shield you.
It's like saying a thousand people throwing pebbles at you simultaneously have less chance hitting your body because you are holding up a tennis ball. Maybe a few will miss you because their pebble will bounce off the tennis ball, but almost all will get through.
The chance of any object large enough to leave a crater visible from earth on the moon being shielded by earth, is very small. While the earth is roughly four times the diameter of the moon, it's at such a distance that it covers a very small part of the total area from which objects from space will hit it.
Just look at the sky at night at a full moon. Calculate roughly how much area the moon covers if it's high up in the sky and multiply the surface area by 8 (4^2 then divide that number by two because you only see half the hemisphere, high up in the sky because the atmosphere makes objects appear larger if they are close to the horizon). It may be easier to imagine the moon about 2.82 times the diameter it is to get to that size. Now picture yourself standing under an umbrella that size, pointed in any random direction and have a thousand people throwing rocks at you from all directions and all distances. How big is the chance that they'd miss because the umbrella would shield you?
You could do the actual math and not do a quick guesstimate like I just did to come up with the exact amount of hemisphere that would be shielded by earth from the moon and come up with a low percentage number. That would still not be the percentage of shielding that you'd get from earth, since the gravitational field will pull in stuff that would be in a trajectory to just pass earth. Some of it will crash on earth as a result of that, some of it will deflect the path such that it may just miss the moon and some of it will pull stuff in a trajectory that will hit the moon while it wouldn't have otherwise. Still, the amount of hemisphere being influenced positively or negatively by this field would be rather small, most of the rocks would just get through regardless.
The big thing shielding both earth and the moon currently are actually the bigger planets further out in our solar system. The main reason we don't get a lot of large objects hitting us is because most stuff getting into our solar system will start being in pulled slowly from outer belts of debris and intersect with one of the big planets gravity fields before they'd even get close. Most of the moon craters we see from here were formed long ago, when there way way more stuff flying around in our solar system, especially just after the crash that triggered the inception of the moon and it just had gotten it's shape. Earth has an atmosphere and tectonics that made any old craters disappear, the moon has kept them since it's inception.
Consumer cars usually have either a metal or a glass-fiber-reinforced PVC tank hidden away in the the frame of the car, just above or behind the rear axle. The GFR tanks have flame retarders in the plastic and are easily as thick as 1/4th inch.Even after Ralph Nadar did his famous "unsafe at any speed" these tanks do get punctured and car fires do occur. Especially when someone gets rear ended, fires way too often start from short circuit under the hood of the rear vehicle, setting the gasoline from the split open tank of the front vehicle on fire. Metal tanks are usually made of thin steel plate, not aluminum and only mounted on cheap consumer cars with bad general safety ratings, or older cars that are usually very unsafe compared to new modern cars anyway.
Gas tanks need armor too to protect them from puncturing. They are just usually not located in a position where the chance that road debris will puncture them directly, but there are plenty of other scenarios where they still get punctured. not only that, gas tanks have thin, vulnerable fuel lines running along the bottom of your car to the front, while Tesla has the power lines shielded way more efficiently. It may not directly set your car ablaze if you cut a fuel line, but it will 50% chance stop your car immediately, or otherwise you won't be able to drive for more than 15 minutes or so before you have dumped all the fuel on the road. If for some reason the leaking fuel were to ignite, you'd be in a whole lot more trouble with that than you'd be with a punctured cell in a Tesla. Imagine the whole bottom of your car sprayed with fuel and set on fire, directing the flames onto your fuel tank with you sitting in the car driving along; without getting a warning until it gets really hot or you see the smoke or flames in your rear view mirror. The moment you stop, flames will be up on all sides of the car making you have to go through fire to get out of the car.
Apart from the fuel tanks getting punctured in accidents, fuel lines often break from the fuel pressure alone during regular driving. These fuel line leaks start under hood fires that can't be put out by the time people notice and stop the car on the road. Most modern cars have no or nearly no rubber fuel lines anymore, but older models have plenty of rubber hoses that dry out and deteriorate with age. Adding ethanol to gasoline has not helped this problem, since it accelerates the aging of these hoses. Many cars spontaneously burn out because of this on a daily basis.
Fuel powered cars have plenty of electric fires as well. Everyone you ask knows several cases that didn't even make the news of cars spontaneously bursting into flames in the driveway or while driving because of a short circuit. Some make the news if it was a slow news day or traffic was impeded because of the fire, but most just go by without any media attention whatsoever. This is not counting the numerous times something like this happens because people added accessories themselves, or some dimwit tried to jump someone elses car and shorted something out with a big fat jumper cable.
If food an games aren't sufficient to keep your populace at bay, you'll use fear. Using fear has it's limitations, because once people will get hungry because you don't provide them with food, they will revolt. History has always proven this principle right and it will do so again. Over 40% of the USA citizens are around or below poverty rates and this number is still growing each year. Regardless of what political party is in control when that happens, there will be mass protests and plundering going on, just like in Egypt or any country where hunger and poverty is abundant and only a few rich people have control.
As if anyone can get 4G coverage long enough to actually put data over it at any interesting rates. You'd have to search for a location where your signal is strong enough so much, that you could just as well be looking for a wifi uplink that will cost nothing more than a cup of coffee at a starbucks or equivalent.
People get to keep their stoves. It's just that stoves that are sold new have to burn cleaner. It's not a witch hunt to find polluting stoves and have people freeze to death.
Yes, new stoves will probably start at a higher price point because of this. People building an open fire place in their new home will have trouble getting a permit for their building. That's about a far as this law will go.
People in rural communities might have to pay a bit more if they want to buy a new stove, but it will be less polluting and probably require less wood to burn to keep your home heated and your food cooked as a bonus. Yes, rural communities suffer pollution too. You may not be directly polluting breathing air for as many neighbours as in a city, but humans breathing particles aren't the only thing that suffer from the pollution. Also, these particles travel a long way, so just because someone isn't huffing on your chimney, doesn't mean they don't get to breathe what came out of it.
It's nice that NVidia is lowering their prices, but they are just not that competitive if you use these cards for password hashing or openCL. I had been using NVidia for the last 12, but I recently switched to an AMD card since at half the price, it was still faster at brute forcing crypto than the NVidia board was. I think NVidia should work on their openCL performance and AMD should work on the number of shaders and such on their chipsets.
OpenCL is the future, why use CUDA if you have a choice?
It used to be that MicroSoft defeated WordPerfect and they had the only usable office suite available, running on what at least 95% of potentially paying customers had as their only means to do office stuff on.
These days, potentially paying customers use a plethora of devices, over half of which are totally not under control of MicroSoft, neither architecture or operating system, let alone business model. Many of these already offer quite capable alternatives to the MicroSoft office products, or free alternatives are readily available. With current document interoperability standards being forced by large groups of customers, vendor lock in using proprietary formats isn't much of an option for MicroSoft any more.
Office software suites haven't really changed much in the last 10 years or so. You can type a letter, make up a document in a unique way that almost totally not looks like it will come out of a printer in infinite ways, pivot your tables in a spreadsheet, hook it up to a database and make boring presentations with the same sort of spiffy animations that we stopped using long ago. It's a dead horse, there's nothing exciting to build left and even your fridge has an office suite available for it in some app store.
TL;DR, Office software is a hard market to compete in, even if you have a large user base. Betting the family fortune on maintaining that user base and milking lots of money out of them without having the benefits of alternative business models like google does, is at best a high risk bet and most likely a guarantee to fail.
I used to use Adobe software until very recently, because my main usage for graphics software was editing my own photographs. I take photos with a proper camera that will use a data format that has more than 8 bits per pixel and does not have lossy compression in the device. Fortunately, darkroom is now good enough to use so I won't have to. If I ever should want to "photoshop" my photos, fortunately Gimp will have RAW support in the next release. To be honest, I haven't looked at CMYK yet, but I really hope that it will have support for that too.
The arrogance that somehow millions of people that are actually prepared to pay for good software because it has features that FOSS doesn't have aren't potential users is really beyond my comprehension. Cost savings aren't just in a license fee, they are in the quality of the final product, fetching a better price, and in the time saved having a better work flow. Darktable has "just started" if you compare it to the time gimp has been around and already I see several serious photo enthusiast people use it for serious work. Since I've got it running with openCL, I haven't started Adobe Lightroom, even though Darktable is still in the "very active development" stage. Again, I don't know about CMYK since I'm not in the printing business, but given the amount of people forking out money to Adobe, I'm sure there will be plenty of shops willing to try Gimp and even donate if it will have proper CMYK and professional color profile support. Get of your high horse and start looking at improvements that will make the app better than what's available. Don't tell people they don't need it just because you yourself don't; it's degrading and makes FOSS look bad. FOSS has a good place in the server room and partially on mobile. The reason it hasn't on the desktop is partially because apps like this just aren't "the best you can get". Visicalc and WordPerfect sold millions of hardware+OS kits, just because of the one application, the rest was mediocre at best. Linux needs a few of those applications too to finally push Windows off it's pedestal.
If you recognize that you are in fact streaming video, you can buffer that video ahead and keep the rest of the display nice and interactive. There's no reason you can't divide the display you are remote serving into several sections and give them each their own update/caching/buffering strategies.
I'm sorry, but both your arguments don't make sense to me. Why would big pockets of closed software vendors make this initiative fail? Will they spend money on this platform to have developers focus on irrelevant features or "harmless" bugs? I can't think of any other way closed source vendors would be spending money on open source to make it worse.?
Honesty? What's dishonest about this? It's out in the open that people are willing to pay others to fix bugs in software. Either the maintainers of the open source package themselves step up and fix it and get paid, or some independent developer will. It may depend on their contributions being accepted by the maintainers, but I don't see anything hidden or dishonest about the process.
It may fail because people aren't willing to pay enough, or the initiative will remain too small to maintain, but I don't really see any other reasons why it would fail otherwise.
The city was functioning, but they couldn't change anything in their infrastructure. It was pretty nasty because from what I understand he locked everything up *after* he got in a conflict, but it wasn't shut down.
The 19" isn't portable, like someone else also said. The 7" is a second hand one, they are $129 new and have a native resolution of 800*480.
TFA claims "over 70 devices" but less than half of devices currently for sale from phone carriers or independent stores are supported by CM. There are vast numbers of Chinese tablets and phones that have no CM ported to them. In practice, "any Android device imaginable" boils down to "premium brand devices that have been abandoned by their vendors for major version updates". I like CM and it's spinoffs, it's very good for the ecosystem and it forces vendors to stay alert and keep supporting their hardware. However, claiming it has support for everything and the kitchen sink is just wrong and it may hurt it's credibility. Supporting over 70 devices is amazing, but it's not the over 1000 devices that are out there.
Apple started it. Android tablets had to be cheaper *and* faster to get a hold of that market. MicroSoft had both the OSes and multiple Android hardware vendors to deal with in an already well established market. They should have positioned their product against the top of Android at a price competing with the mid range of that tablet market.
Also, they shouldn't try and position a pimped up tablet that was too crippled to take on netbooks, notebooks or ultrabooks at a price point higher than these. If you're selling it as an ultrabook with detachable keyboard, make it like that. the notebook/laptop/ultrabook/netbook format machines have hinges for a reason. It means you can position your device on any three-point surface with the base and adjust the screen so that you can look at it semi-comfortably. A kick stand doesn't work that way, because you need a totally flat surface at the correct hight in order to make use of your device with such a contraption.
The sad part here is that the UI and the fact that you could use a lot of your code base for both desktop and portable device applications are lost because of these marketing decisions. If you ignore history and fanatic MicroSoft bashing and just look at the ergonomics of the tile interface and judge it by it's merits on a touch screen device, it's pretty good. The reason why Nokia's entry level phones are actually selling in Europe is not just because of the camera, the UI isn't half bad either and it's quite zippy on the lower spec hardware. For that money, you can't get an iPhone and the Android offerings at the same price point aren't stunning.
I think they would have actually had a chance and may still have if they would get their head unstuck from between their buttocks and would just start competing their devices at whatever point the market puts them. That may mean they'd lose on every device they were selling for a few years. They were willing to take that risk with the Xbox and it looks like they have a solid gaming division set up now. Sell the tablets as tablets, price them so people would buy the one that's "so much better than the ipad/android at the same price" and hook them into xbox live as a unique selling point. By crossing over xbox games onto the tablets, you can make people do parts of the games on their tablets. The dog in GTA5 is a very good example why this sort of thing works and MicroSoft would be stupid not to use their xbox customers to extend their tablet market.
Before you'll be calling me a fanboi, I'd much rather see good things happen to open source. Google has closed off most of Android apps, the kernel is totally forked from Linux and most hardware drivers are closed source. Even CyanogenMod has gone commercial now. I'm hoping one of the other Linux attempts at tablets or some *BSD attempt, will actually kick off and make a difference. The reason I am saying this is that even though I don't like MicroSofts business politics, I think the world would benefit from some good competition on the tablet market. MicroSoft genuinely has done quite a few things right, despite screwing up a lot of other things.
I really don't see myself running FreeBSD in a VM on my tablet. It'd be hell to control the GUI stuff, let alone do the keyboard input. Tablets are used mostly for consuming, not for development or simulation.
Others have said similar things already, but this will never work. Any tool that can be used to do something useful, can be used to harm someone else. That is true for most tools we humans use and also applies to most "cyber tools". Using a network scanner to find intruders or bad configured systems is good, using it to find someone that wants to get information out of a censored government is bad. Using a load tester to see if your system can handle the users it's designed for is good, but using it to take down some system that is run by someone you oppose of is bad.
She has no idea that the tools exclusively marketed as cyber weapons are nothing more than window dressing for existing things. Any government spending money on this either needs the window dressing and can't make their own, or is too stupid to understand this sort of thing. The more they spend money on cyber weapons, the less they will spend it on potentially more harmful things. Please let them be, it's a snake oil market and anyone buying the snake oil deserves what they get for their money.
There were things in the files he released that weren't crimes as long as you were looking at only the USA laws. Releasing those harmed USA spying efforts and as such, is treason and/or espionage. The fact that a significant part of these files revealed that the NSA were in fact breaking USA laws doesn't make the part that he released the rest of it go away.
Robin of Hood committed crimes, even if he gave the profits of those crimes to the poor. While I think the world is overall better off with Snowden doing what he did, that doesn't make these charges bogus all of a sudden. He did something unlawful, even if his intent was good. If you don't agree with this being unlawful, you should try and work on getting the laws changed.
Sorry, but I'd like to see at least some unsubstantiated arguments for your opinion. Proof of those would be even better, but this being slashdot, I'm not counting on much. A score 5 comment without anything but an opinion? C'mon mods, you're not even trying anymore....
Seriously, try working at that DPI all day and actually using that resolution. Your letters would be so small your eyes would get tired way before you reach the 8hrs. You can focus on a screen that close for a limited time only. To work comfortably on screens all day long, they need to be at least 60cm (2ft) from your eyes, making densities over 120 DPI useless for anyone that's not into graphics design.
Maybe you young whippersnapper can pull this off, but once you hit 30 or something, you won't. I'm over 40 and I don't need reading glasses or anything. My eyes still test so good, they need a manual device to test the limits, the computer ones are too slow to register because my eyes adapt faster than they can read them. Still, if I have to work all day on (small) high DPI screens driving home after work I notice I have trouble to focus quickly enough on things happening in traffic. It's not that it's dangerous or anything, but I have to get a lot closer to a sign before I can properly read it than I have to in the morning, or I will have to look at it so long that it will get dangerous if I do that while driving. I get more headaches and later in the day, I tend to not want to work on the computer anymore because I have trouble concentrating on what I read. At home, on my comfortable dual 30" 2560*1600 screens, I have no problem doing 10 hours of work on the same sort of things.
Having to work often at equipment provided by customers, I see a trend of making techies work on a high resolution laptop screen that's 15" or less, while it used to be that we got large dual screens made available to us. Not only do we seriously lack screen real estate in pixel count, we also don't get the font size required for comfortable and fast reading all day long. Stop the craze of insane DPIs and smaller screens and start focusing on ergonomics again. There's a reason we had these large screens in the past and that reason hasn't changed. It's called ergonomics and if you want people to perform, it's cheaper to give them a bit more tech than to throw infinite monkeys at a problem.
What makes me kind of sad is that most companies and governments never learn from lessons that the past have already taught us. It was obvious that connecting so many different vendors through one web site was going to be a pain unless some communication protocol was established as a standard. What if this sort of thing, after being established, was thoroughly tested before a universal front end was created? However obvious this was, it didn't happen for the usual reasons; politics, delegation of blame, responsibilities and the usual unclear communication.
(grumpy old man voice) If we were ate war and the military was responsible for this, they would have gotten this sorted out in 24 hours! If only lives would depend on it, things would have gone so much smoother! Oh wait....
These machines do two things:
1. They try to infect other machines. They seem to use several methods for this. One is infecting USB sticks and other media. They have been observed abusing an old windows exploit that uses true type fonts as the vector for that.
2. They are trying to communicate with other infected machines. They use some rather inventive carriers for that it seems. One of these appears to be sound. How it works isn't published yet. Another seems to be to use out-of-band communication by putting data inside host-option packets in DHCP. It's obvious that the malware uses such side channels to avoid detection. The OOB communication is done purely to keep in touch with "the swarm" and is not used to infect other machines.
The real nastiness appears to be that this malware is able to infect multiple operating systems that are usually passed by malware manufacturers and also happens to be able to nest itself on the eeprom of infected machines. Both are more or less "a first" and the combination hasn't been seen in the wild either.
Right now, there's a lot of discovery being done and a lot of speculation taking place as to who made it, what it can do, how it gets itself in eeprom and prevents itself from being overwritten during reflashing of the bios. It's not known if the virus will attempt to infect virtual machines, or will only infect machines that will let it nest in it's bios. Also, anything malicious apart from infecting and communicating hasn't been observed. For all we know, it may be a true worm that does nothing but replicate and is an out of control experiment.
So far, no infections appear to have been seen on virtual machines, or machines that don't have an intel chipset. I haven't seen any linux infected machines mentioned, but don't hold your breath on that, if *BSD and OSX have been infected, Linux may very well be infected too. Windows is infected for certain, but what versions are exactly vulnerable isn't clear to me at this time.
Thus far, the only thing that can be advised to prevent infection is the usual; don't trust content/media from sources that could be spreading infections, knowingly or not and keep your system up to date. If applicable, set your bios read-only with hardware switches or jumpers and if at all possible, put passwords on bioses and put software blocks on updates as well. To this date it's not known if and what software blocks will prevent the malware, but it's best to give it as few attack surfaces as possible.
In Euro land, you either pay with your debit card, or you pay cash. If you pay cash, the cashier usually either just puts the bills in the register, or they do a check in a standalone machine to see if the machine approves of the currency. Registers that count money and have a built in validator are rare and only now are starting to appear in bigger supermarkets.
Crooks here in Europe are very good at firmware updates or hardware modification on POS type equipment. Until very recently our omnipresent debit cards used a magnet strip and a pin code for payments. It got to be a weekly news item that such and such store or popular gas station had their PIN terminals skimmed and thousands of customers had their bank accounts cleaned out with copied cards and "recorded" PIN numbers. Cards still occasionally get skimmed, but debit cards are usually blocked by default outside the EU and inside the EU you need a smart card to make PIN payments. Skimmers can't copy the smart chip of the debit card, so they can't use the card unless they steal the physical item. This leaves the success rate of skimming a magnet strip+pin to the rare cards that are unblocked for outside of the EU and it requires accomplices in for instance India or so to clean out the accounts of the cards you swiped. Until someone finds a nice attack on the smart cards (I don't think it will take long, cell phone SIM cards have been hacked too), we won't be seeing them attack electronic payments in brick and mortar stores on a large scale soon. They will most likely move their game towards getting their own fake currency accepted by the validators and start buying small items with large bills, or resell the items to replace the "loss of income" since skimming debit cards wasn't profitable any more.
TL;DR In Europe firmware mods are the most successful mods for this sort of hack/fraud.
Google is getting pretty obnoxious. They want you to use your real name, merge all your accounts, get google+ and "add accounts" to gmail in the web interface. Really, if I wanted to do that, I'd do it myself. I can't switch it off and instead of just fast and easy access to the application I am/was used to I keep on getting confronted with constantly changing interfaces, nags about merging stuff, getting accounts on stuff I refuse to use and whatnot. Handing over your mail so they could profile you is bad enough, but at least you got a relatively trouble free service for it in return. They've turned into the thing that made people flee to them, and people will flee away. Once I get proper backups sorted, I'll run my mail on my own servers again and use a bunch of sock puppet accounts to do my searching and all that. Screw you Google, I'm going home.