where there is no responsibility, there is no freedom
if you don't understand or agree with that statement, you don't even know what freedom really is
All right, I'm intrigued. To me, freedom in the legal sense is about immunity from consequences, i.e. that you can do something without being punished. Freedom is different from legal rights in that it's the default -- if nobody threatens you with violence, you are free. If the government grants you (or recognises your right to) freedom of speech , you can say anything without being persecuted by the government. The fact that others can ostrichise you or condemn you for the speech is orthogonal to the question of freedom. Even the government can disagree, but they can't use their special powers. Then the famous example of yelling "fire" in a theatre, to cause danger and panic. This is illegal, but that is a restriction of the freedom of speech. Less freedom. The lawmakers maintain that some limitations of the freedom of speech are necessary for a functioning society. There is no mandate of personal responsibility, it's all "you do X and I track you down and lock you up". (I'm not saying this is wrong, I don't have a coherent opinion on it)
So, how does responsibility factor in? Is your statement a practical one, that society cannot function unless people take responsibility? If so , that seems like a question of ethics, whether this is truly responsibility or instead compassion, "goodness" or maximisation of utility. The concept of freedom is also only indirectly involved.
So I think I finally got it (I should probably edit the post now, but I won't, sorry if I bored you to death [i.e. I abused my freedom of speech to infringe on your right to live]). Having ultimate freedom means having the ability to infringe on others' freedoms, so such a system is not only impractical, it is fundamentally inconsistent. I still don't think that responsibility is the solution, though it would be nice if we could not restrict people's freedom to punch wherever they damn well pleased, and rely on their human decency to not have them beat each other up. In practice, I think responsibility enters, but the granting of freedoms seems carefully measured so that an irresponsible person can't do too much harm (with multiple exceptions, of course, but only at the level of ppb).
This leaves people who are not technically inclined and not lucky enough to be trained and/or have talent in other areas, to do what? Career criminal? Lifetime welfare recipient? Both?
We seem to find things to do even when all needs are met, some possible examples are -Farming gold in WoW, etc -Farming IRL for locally grown food using outdated non-industrial methods -Organising concerts and other entertainment events -Theme parks (could be greatly expanded)
Even so, the economic system should be adjusted when appropriate, and the extra jobs above are just a transition period. This will happen when it's blindingly obvious that not everyone has to do a full day's work to sustain humanity. There still needs to be a way to motivate the techs, but it's quite possible that they would do it for free.
The idea that the majority can't contribute anything significant to society, and may just as well do nothing, is a psychological challenge. The economics can be worked out, but we may indeed see a wave of crime just so people have something to do
I get it.. going to the site is sort of like the incident in the story, just talking about polygraphs. But there's no need to pretend that people will get arrested for visiting a website about polygraphs (some other sites, like porn, may be different).
It also protects against theft of the physical servers and residual data on discarded drives. Not as big of an issue for Google, but server side encryption is good for small operations.
The motherboard in the subject came with a header for installation of a TPM, but no actual TPM, and supports both UEFI and BIOS. Leaving out the TPM seems like a cost saving move rather than a privacy one. [It has a LGA1155 socket, which is being phased out, but it's pretty fast with a Xeon E3-12??v2. ECC monitoring not supported on Linux, if you're interested. I wish there was a chip that was equally fast per core, but with more cores..]
I wouldn't worry about TPMs for privacy or security anyway. There may be a backdoor in TPM, but all it could do is to negate the security of the TPM. There may be other hardware backdoors, but there is currently no way to protect against that. If the CPU had a back door that was triggered by a 128 bit pattern, or a sequence of arithmetic or floating point instructions and operands, this could be delivered over the internet to any host as part of an image file over HTTP, regardless of firewalls, VPNs and virtual machines. [The only solution I can think of would be to implement an emulator which re-maps memory addresses randomly at the byte level, and fudges the operands in calculations (maybe adds a random number to the operands, then subtracts it afterwards)]
I would like the OP also try to stick with legacy BIOS, just for practical reasons.
They hadn't already enabled SSL? This is a travesty. SSL should be enabled to protect against opportunistic hackers at public wi-fi networks etc. It will also protect against more advanced enemies like the mafia (the mafia would probably use trojans or hardware wiretaps, if they actually do tech stuff).
SSL isn't that great vs. big governments anyway: anyone with any valid CA cert can spoof a valid cert for any site. It does, however, mean that they can't passively tap the stream, they have to use a man in the middle attack (or possibly immense computing resources or unknown weaknesses in the algorithm).
Linux itself doesn't spy on you. There is a lot of network code in the kernel, but there would be quite a debacle if it connected to anything on the internet by default.
As for desktop linux distros, there was a big story when Ubuntu started to send "local" search queries to Amazon. So you can expect that any more serious spying would get an even bigger objection. There is still potential for secret spying, but that is true for any system you don't build from scratch, and it's impossible to know. Fedora uploads crash dumps to their servers, but only on explicit request and with proper warning. When I still used it in F18 it connected to the network when you mis-typed a command (to try and find a package with that command), but I'm not sure if it actually sent the string you typed.
Linux distros may also connect to NTP servers and update servers by default, but there is no way for the servers to identify a specific host. If the government already knows your IP address, it can at best (worst) tell them when you were awake, but there are many other entities which are better positioned to give this information. Any application software can of course spy, and browsers do that unless customised
It's about time to have dynamic power management for Radeons (from a user point of view, don't know how difficult it is). It's just a bad default to have it spinning at full speed all the time, because most graphics card make a lot of noise when running at full speed. The alternative was to default to a low power mode, which reduces the performance for anyone who doesn't bother to look up the controls.
The problem with dynamic PM is that many times you need the performance quickly and for a short time. Can the card switch modes in much less than a 120th of a second, such that you don't get an impact on performance (on at 120Hz monitor)? Can it detect that it needs to switch modes in a similarly short time? It's not that bad of a problem, because most cards can run the desktop effects in low power mode (didn't work for me on Gnome, but I assume that's a bug since it was great in KDE). The main problem would be with hardware video decoding or deinterlacing and gaming, but I don't think the open driver supports any video decoding, and deinterlacing should have a reasonably constant load.
Overall, great to have dynamic PM. It may help with laptop battery life for many people who haven't bothered to check the PM settings before. For me who turns down the performance to low, I don't have to remember to turn it up before playing games etc.
The problem with Linux seems to be that it's introducing a lot of new technologies that make it more difficult to do advanced administration (exactly the things you mentioned). The gain is often minimal. I find that RHEL-based distros are very sane in this regard. It may be that they are just years behind the other distros, but I think they do a bit of filtering too with regards to what technologies to add.
This is all different than the objections to Windows 8.1. There we are talking tying in the software with MS services, and Linux doesn't do that a lot. There are of course software repositories, but that's an integral part of an OS now, and one can install third-party repositories. The closest thing is when Ubuntu integrated Amazon into their file search widget, and there was a big reaction to that. Apple is the third OS vendor, and they also seem to be going this way, with their iCloud and app store etc. I don't use Apple, and one of the reasons I was initially put off by them, some 15 years or so ago, was QuickTime for Windows. There were greyed out menu items that said you had to buy the pro version. That's clearly an ad, and they choose to clutter up the menus for me to sell me stuff. Even for a free program, that doesn't make me want more of their software. At that point, MS didn't have any ads and "activation" was a big controversy (I mean, it's still a bloody pain, I have to call the activation robot ~2 times every year, but people seem to accept it). Linux is the only major OS that still keeps this ethos from the early 00s, and hasn't given in to DRM and service maina.
I'd assume the NSA has SSL private keys they can use at will to intercept (MITM) SSL connections. The question is if they just have some "standard" leaked certificates which could be spotted by opening the detailed info window, or if they have some common ones like VeriSign as well. I don't have any proof, but it's just too easy.
The reason for using a cloud is consolidation of resources, manpower and experience. Most companies are better off outsourcing some things because they wouldn't utilise their on premises resources near 100 % (e.g. at night, in vacations). CERN can run simulations all of the time, so there is always demand, and they can hire many experts without them "idling" most of the time. I don't think public clouds are a must for them and I'm even skeptical of VM technology, because they are dealing with friendly code in batch jobs, which need as much performance as they can get. Unix multiprocessing and user limits should be able to handle this, perhaps coupled with chroots if required, to be able to support different userland libraries for different experiments. They can surely benefit from the great work that's being done on open source cloud management though.
I almost forgot about the nice way to enable power management on the open driver. echo profile >/sys/class/drm/card0/device/power_method echo low >/sys/class/drm/card0/device/power_profile You can set it to low speed or full speed. Even on a desktop it's kind of annoying to have to do that manually. I ended up running at low speed all the time because I forgot to change it (except when using Gnome3, but that's a separate rant) and it worked fine, but it's still kind of lame.
Make sure you buy an older card. The free software driver driver for 7000+ cards is a broken joke.
I have the 6770. The open source driver worked well when I briefly used the very latest kernel in Arch. I couldn't stand the constant updates and installed Scientific Linux. Now the open driver is back to being slow and horrible again. The proprietary driver crashes instead. I can use the 6770 on the desktop without compiz-like effects and it doesn't crash, but I can't do any gaming in wine. I'm getting an nVidia GT640, it's been ordered. I think it's a bit sad because ATI are clearly working on their open drivers, but I just need a video card that works. I think it's a bit unfortunate, as the ATI seemed to work well on 3.9 and possibly 3.8 kernels. I played some Heroes of Newerth and it worked well, and I don't expect much from Wine gaming even with nVidia.
*I'm 99 % sure that the issues I have are due to the video card and driver, but I also run ZFS which does some funky memory management things, so I can't rule that out as the culprit. Will post back here in a few days if nVidia one is just as troublesome.
Btw, I feel for the people who need to use Windows for other stuff, not just gaming. They have to take the (presumably) good with the bad, in a way that's worse than Unity and Gnome3 put together. There are no alternative shells, except maybe a few hackish ones. I will also be in that camp if I can't get the KVM thing to work, as I need to dual boot and thus make myself somewhat comfortable in W8:S
I only use Windows for an IM application and gaming (not even gaming now, but I'm hoping to do some trickery with KVM and PCI passthrough). When games become significantly better in W8 than in W7 I may have to fork out some cash. Kind of a sneaky tactic of MS to tie it to an API upgrade, but I'm getting updates for W7 for free, so it's maybe fair that I should upgrade to W8 sooner or (very much) later. I wish I had bought a copy when it was on special offer. I assume that games will run well on W7 for years to come, so it doesn't even justify a "meh"
RAM doesn't help you boot faster, but 32 GB helps it running super fast after that by caching everything. IMO 32 GB is probably overkill for four or less cores (you didn't say how many cores the HP has), though 16 can get a bit tight some times and 32 isn't that expensive. I use suspend to RAM on my workstation and only reboot for rare kernel upgrades (OS is Scientific Linux) or hardware changes. For windows, I you'd be looking at a minimum of a monthly reboot on patch Tuesday, but that's not too bad. Maybe I'm strange, but I get a bit irritated when people post boot speed as the only metric for performance. It's about fifth on my list of performance concerns after raw compute power, responsiveness, application startup from cache and multitasking ability.
I don't know if you're being sarcastic, but you're on to something. If we're talking streaming of entertainment, the people using this service are not actually breaking copyright in the US or NZ. They are not making a copy. They are however very likely breaking the terms of use of the service (though the streaming site could be relying 100 % on IP-blocking, and not have it written in their terms of use). As we know from whatshisname who downloaded papers from MIT, terms of use violations can be a felony in the US. Half-measures like this global mode seem stupid to me. The content owner insist on a legalistic, to the letter interpretation of copyright. If you're going to infringe on their copyiright (or ToS, etc) anyway, why not do it for free and download a torrent? Anyway, the streaming services should just correct their IP->country mapping, unless the NZ ISP uses some kind of shared VPNish IP space.
It's actually very difficult for the text to be read and filtered by a computer using this form of obfuscation, as long as there are enough variants of each letter, and they are well randomised throughout the content. However, you don't actually need a special font: http://www.tienhuis.nl/utf8-generator
It's like a keyless cipher that's just a character mapping (with random selection of character). If anyone used the font for something serious, the NSA could construct the inverse mapping in days manually. In fact, if the font is to be effective, the forward mapping has to be implemented in software, i.e. a program to convert normal text to "encrypted" text, and NSA could use that software to implement an automatic decoder in an hour.
For someone who just needs a torrent every 3 months or so, this cat-and-mouse game quite annoying. How about making a Tor hidden service for things like thepiratebay, just like the silk road? ( https://www.torproject.org/docs/tor-hidden-service.html.en ). I am wary of suggesting it, because it will turn the powerful media lobby against Tor, but someone is going to have a fit about Tor sooner or later anyway. In fact, Tor is quite extreme, because it allows hosting of *anything* without any possibility for censorship. Most people (excluding me of course) would want to be able to censor some kinds of (more or less extreme) information, be it porn, exploits, national secrets or copyrighted material.
Dropbox uses LAN sync when available. Granted, people don't usually stick gigabytes of stuff on dropbox and expect it to sync immediately, but it's still a bonus when it's fast.
Maybe it's a bandwidth issue. At 480Mbit/s you can push 1366x768 24 bit colour at 20 Hz. There would possibly be some compression, but it can't be too fancy as you'd have to drive it from USB power (if you allow an external adapter then just use DVI or DisplayPort anyway). Now with USB3 there is 10x as much bandwidth and more power, but that only equates to a factor sqrt(10)~3 in linear resolution (i.e., bandwidth increases greatly with pixel density). Still, a factor 3 on 1366x768 is amazing resolution, so USB3 would be the way to go.
Isn't Google's music service DRM'ed, even if you "buy" the music? And things like Spotify are of course DRM'ed. Seems like even in music, it's reverting back to DRM. Seems like we're moving to a different model, where people don't "own" copies of entertainment / cultural works. It's not inherently a problem, if the majority prefers this model then people and business will be happy. There is one problem: things can be more easily censored and modified by government and business. (I'm against DRM, won't buy DRM'ed things to keep, I record some over the air TV and buy CDs [CDs have better quality than MP3s])
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where there is no responsibility, there is no freedom
if you don't understand or agree with that statement, you don't even know what freedom really is
All right, I'm intrigued. To me, freedom in the legal sense is about immunity from consequences, i.e. that you can do something without being punished. Freedom is different from legal rights in that it's the default -- if nobody threatens you with violence, you are free. If the government grants you (or recognises your right to) freedom of speech , you can say anything without being persecuted by the government. The fact that others can ostrichise you or condemn you for the speech is orthogonal to the question of freedom. Even the government can disagree, but they can't use their special powers. Then the famous example of yelling "fire" in a theatre, to cause danger and panic. This is illegal, but that is a restriction of the freedom of speech. Less freedom. The lawmakers maintain that some limitations of the freedom of speech are necessary for a functioning society. There is no mandate of personal responsibility, it's all "you do X and I track you down and lock you up". (I'm not saying this is wrong, I don't have a coherent opinion on it)
So, how does responsibility factor in? Is your statement a practical one, that society cannot function unless people take responsibility? If so , that seems like a question of ethics, whether this is truly responsibility or instead compassion, "goodness" or maximisation of utility. The concept of freedom is also only indirectly involved.
So I think I finally got it (I should probably edit the post now, but I won't, sorry if I bored you to death [i.e. I abused my freedom of speech to infringe on your right to live]). Having ultimate freedom means having the ability to infringe on others' freedoms, so such a system is not only impractical, it is fundamentally inconsistent. I still don't think that responsibility is the solution, though it would be nice if we could not restrict people's freedom to punch wherever they damn well pleased, and rely on their human decency to not have them beat each other up. In practice, I think responsibility enters, but the granting of freedoms seems carefully measured so that an irresponsible person can't do too much harm (with multiple exceptions, of course, but only at the level of ppb).
This leaves people who are not technically inclined and not lucky enough to be trained and/or have talent in other areas, to do what? Career criminal? Lifetime welfare recipient? Both?
We seem to find things to do even when all needs are met, some possible examples are
-Farming gold in WoW, etc
-Farming IRL for locally grown food using outdated non-industrial methods
-Organising concerts and other entertainment events
-Theme parks (could be greatly expanded)
Even so, the economic system should be adjusted when appropriate, and the extra jobs above are just a transition period. This will happen when it's blindingly obvious that not everyone has to do a full day's work to sustain humanity. There still needs to be a way to motivate the techs, but it's quite possible that they would do it for free.
The idea that the majority can't contribute anything significant to society, and may just as well do nothing, is a psychological challenge. The economics can be worked out, but we may indeed see a wave of crime just so people have something to do
I get it.. going to the site is sort of like the incident in the story, just talking about polygraphs. But there's no need to pretend that people will get arrested for visiting a website about polygraphs (some other sites, like porn, may be different).
It also protects against theft of the physical servers and residual data on discarded drives. Not as big of an issue for Google, but server side encryption is good for small operations.
The motherboard in the subject came with a header for installation of a TPM, but no actual TPM, and supports both UEFI and BIOS. Leaving out the TPM seems like a cost saving move rather than a privacy one. [It has a LGA1155 socket, which is being phased out, but it's pretty fast with a Xeon E3-12??v2. ECC monitoring not supported on Linux, if you're interested. I wish there was a chip that was equally fast per core, but with more cores..]
I wouldn't worry about TPMs for privacy or security anyway. There may be a backdoor in TPM, but all it could do is to negate the security of the TPM. There may be other hardware backdoors, but there is currently no way to protect against that. If the CPU had a back door that was triggered by a 128 bit pattern, or a sequence of arithmetic or floating point instructions and operands, this could be delivered over the internet to any host as part of an image file over HTTP, regardless of firewalls, VPNs and virtual machines. [The only solution I can think of would be to implement an emulator which re-maps memory addresses randomly at the byte level, and fudges the operands in calculations (maybe adds a random number to the operands, then subtracts it afterwards)]
I would like the OP also try to stick with legacy BIOS, just for practical reasons.
http://ask.slashdot.org/story/12/10/21/1335208/ask-slashdot-why-does-wireless-gear-degrade-over-time
Don't think there was a consensus, but some ideas
(You can thank firefox's nice address bar for me being able to find this in less than a minute. Maybe google would have done it too, though)
They hadn't already enabled SSL? This is a travesty. SSL should be enabled to protect against opportunistic hackers at public wi-fi networks etc. It will also protect against more advanced enemies like the mafia (the mafia would probably use trojans or hardware wiretaps, if they actually do tech stuff).
SSL isn't that great vs. big governments anyway: anyone with any valid CA cert can spoof a valid cert for any site. It does, however, mean that they can't passively tap the stream, they have to use a man in the middle attack (or possibly immense computing resources or unknown weaknesses in the algorithm).
Linux itself doesn't spy on you. There is a lot of network code in the kernel, but there would be quite a debacle if it connected to anything on the internet by default.
As for desktop linux distros, there was a big story when Ubuntu started to send "local" search queries to Amazon. So you can expect that any more serious spying would get an even bigger objection. There is still potential for secret spying, but that is true for any system you don't build from scratch, and it's impossible to know. Fedora uploads crash dumps to their servers, but only on explicit request and with proper warning. When I still used it in F18 it connected to the network when you mis-typed a command (to try and find a package with that command), but I'm not sure if it actually sent the string you typed.
Linux distros may also connect to NTP servers and update servers by default, but there is no way for the servers to identify a specific host. If the government already knows your IP address, it can at best (worst) tell them when you were awake, but there are many other entities which are better positioned to give this information. Any application software can of course spy, and browsers do that unless customised
It's about time to have dynamic power management for Radeons (from a user point of view, don't know how difficult it is). It's just a bad default to have it spinning at full speed all the time, because most graphics card make a lot of noise when running at full speed. The alternative was to default to a low power mode, which reduces the performance for anyone who doesn't bother to look up the controls.
The problem with dynamic PM is that many times you need the performance quickly and for a short time. Can the card switch modes in much less than a 120th of a second, such that you don't get an impact on performance (on at 120Hz monitor)? Can it detect that it needs to switch modes in a similarly short time? It's not that bad of a problem, because most cards can run the desktop effects in low power mode (didn't work for me on Gnome, but I assume that's a bug since it was great in KDE). The main problem would be with hardware video decoding or deinterlacing and gaming, but I don't think the open driver supports any video decoding, and deinterlacing should have a reasonably constant load.
Overall, great to have dynamic PM. It may help with laptop battery life for many people who haven't bothered to check the PM settings before. For me who turns down the performance to low, I don't have to remember to turn it up before playing games etc.
The problem with Linux seems to be that it's introducing a lot of new technologies that make it more difficult to do advanced administration (exactly the things you mentioned). The gain is often minimal. I find that RHEL-based distros are very sane in this regard. It may be that they are just years behind the other distros, but I think they do a bit of filtering too with regards to what technologies to add.
This is all different than the objections to Windows 8.1. There we are talking tying in the software with MS services, and Linux doesn't do that a lot. There are of course software repositories, but that's an integral part of an OS now, and one can install third-party repositories. The closest thing is when Ubuntu integrated Amazon into their file search widget, and there was a big reaction to that. Apple is the third OS vendor, and they also seem to be going this way, with their iCloud and app store etc. I don't use Apple, and one of the reasons I was initially put off by them, some 15 years or so ago, was QuickTime for Windows. There were greyed out menu items that said you had to buy the pro version. That's clearly an ad, and they choose to clutter up the menus for me to sell me stuff. Even for a free program, that doesn't make me want more of their software. At that point, MS didn't have any ads and "activation" was a big controversy (I mean, it's still a bloody pain, I have to call the activation robot ~2 times every year, but people seem to accept it). Linux is the only major OS that still keeps this ethos from the early 00s, and hasn't given in to DRM and service maina.
I'd assume the NSA has SSL private keys they can use at will to intercept (MITM) SSL connections. The question is if they just have some "standard" leaked certificates which could be spotted by opening the detailed info window, or if they have some common ones like VeriSign as well. I don't have any proof, but it's just too easy.
The reason for using a cloud is consolidation of resources, manpower and experience. Most companies are better off outsourcing some things because they wouldn't utilise their on premises resources near 100 % (e.g. at night, in vacations). CERN can run simulations all of the time, so there is always demand, and they can hire many experts without them "idling" most of the time. I don't think public clouds are a must for them and I'm even skeptical of VM technology, because they are dealing with friendly code in batch jobs, which need as much performance as they can get. Unix multiprocessing and user limits should be able to handle this, perhaps coupled with chroots if required, to be able to support different userland libraries for different experiments. They can surely benefit from the great work that's being done on open source cloud management though.
I almost forgot about the nice way to enable power management on the open driver. /sys/class/drm/card0/device/power_method /sys/class/drm/card0/device/power_profile
echo profile >
echo low >
You can set it to low speed or full speed. Even on a desktop it's kind of annoying to have to do that manually. I ended up running at low speed all the time because I forgot to change it (except when using Gnome3, but that's a separate rant) and it worked fine, but it's still kind of lame.
Make sure you buy an older card. The free software driver driver for 7000+ cards is a broken joke.
I have the 6770. The open source driver worked well when I briefly used the very latest kernel in Arch. I couldn't stand the constant updates and installed Scientific Linux. Now the open driver is back to being slow and horrible again. The proprietary driver crashes instead. I can use the 6770 on the desktop without compiz-like effects and it doesn't crash, but I can't do any gaming in wine. I'm getting an nVidia GT640, it's been ordered. I think it's a bit sad because ATI are clearly working on their open drivers, but I just need a video card that works. I think it's a bit unfortunate, as the ATI seemed to work well on 3.9 and possibly 3.8 kernels. I played some Heroes of Newerth and it worked well, and I don't expect much from Wine gaming even with nVidia.
*I'm 99 % sure that the issues I have are due to the video card and driver, but I also run ZFS which does some funky memory management things, so I can't rule that out as the culprit. Will post back here in a few days if nVidia one is just as troublesome.
Seems already solved pretty well, see this:
https://github.com/exaexa/codecrypt
Way to go AC answer my question before I got to ask it :) (don't have mod points)
Btw, I feel for the people who need to use Windows for other stuff, not just gaming. They have to take the (presumably) good with the bad, in a way that's worse than Unity and Gnome3 put together. There are no alternative shells, except maybe a few hackish ones. I will also be in that camp if I can't get the KVM thing to work, as I need to dual boot and thus make myself somewhat comfortable in W8 :S
I only use Windows for an IM application and gaming (not even gaming now, but I'm hoping to do some trickery with KVM and PCI passthrough). When games become significantly better in W8 than in W7 I may have to fork out some cash. Kind of a sneaky tactic of MS to tie it to an API upgrade, but I'm getting updates for W7 for free, so it's maybe fair that I should upgrade to W8 sooner or (very much) later. I wish I had bought a copy when it was on special offer. I assume that games will run well on W7 for years to come, so it doesn't even justify a "meh"
RAM doesn't help you boot faster, but 32 GB helps it running super fast after that by caching everything. IMO 32 GB is probably overkill for four or less cores (you didn't say how many cores the HP has), though 16 can get a bit tight some times and 32 isn't that expensive. I use suspend to RAM on my workstation and only reboot for rare kernel upgrades (OS is Scientific Linux) or hardware changes. For windows, I you'd be looking at a minimum of a monthly reboot on patch Tuesday, but that's not too bad. Maybe I'm strange, but I get a bit irritated when people post boot speed as the only metric for performance. It's about fifth on my list of performance concerns after raw compute power, responsiveness, application startup from cache and multitasking ability.
I don't know if you're being sarcastic, but you're on to something. If we're talking streaming of entertainment, the people using this service are not actually breaking copyright in the US or NZ. They are not making a copy. They are however very likely breaking the terms of use of the service (though the streaming site could be relying 100 % on IP-blocking, and not have it written in their terms of use). As we know from whatshisname who downloaded papers from MIT, terms of use violations can be a felony in the US. Half-measures like this global mode seem stupid to me. The content owner insist on a legalistic, to the letter interpretation of copyright. If you're going to infringe on their copyiright (or ToS, etc) anyway, why not do it for free and download a torrent? Anyway, the streaming services should just correct their IP->country mapping, unless the NZ ISP uses some kind of shared VPNish IP space.
It's actually very difficult for the text to be read and filtered by a computer using this form of obfuscation, as long as there are enough variants of each letter, and they are well randomised throughout the content. However, you don't actually need a special font:
http://www.tienhuis.nl/utf8-generator
It's like a keyless cipher that's just a character mapping (with random selection of character). If anyone used the font for something serious, the NSA could construct the inverse mapping in days manually. In fact, if the font is to be effective, the forward mapping has to be implemented in software, i.e. a program to convert normal text to "encrypted" text, and NSA could use that software to implement an automatic decoder in an hour.
For someone who just needs a torrent every 3 months or so, this cat-and-mouse game quite annoying. How about making a Tor hidden service for things like thepiratebay, just like the silk road? ( https://www.torproject.org/docs/tor-hidden-service.html.en ). I am wary of suggesting it, because it will turn the powerful media lobby against Tor, but someone is going to have a fit about Tor sooner or later anyway. In fact, Tor is quite extreme, because it allows hosting of *anything* without any possibility for censorship. Most people (excluding me of course) would want to be able to censor some kinds of (more or less extreme) information, be it porn, exploits, national secrets or copyrighted material.
Dropbox uses LAN sync when available. Granted, people don't usually stick gigabytes of stuff on dropbox and expect it to sync immediately, but it's still a bonus when it's fast.
Maybe it's a bandwidth issue. At 480Mbit/s you can push 1366x768 24 bit colour at 20 Hz. There would possibly be some compression, but it can't be too fancy as you'd have to drive it from USB power (if you allow an external adapter then just use DVI or DisplayPort anyway). Now with USB3 there is 10x as much bandwidth and more power, but that only equates to a factor sqrt(10)~3 in linear resolution (i.e., bandwidth increases greatly with pixel density). Still, a factor 3 on 1366x768 is amazing resolution, so USB3 would be the way to go.
Isn't Google's music service DRM'ed, even if you "buy" the music? And things like Spotify are of course DRM'ed. Seems like even in music, it's reverting back to DRM. Seems like we're moving to a different model, where people don't "own" copies of entertainment / cultural works. It's not inherently a problem, if the majority prefers this model then people and business will be happy. There is one problem: things can be more easily censored and modified by government and business. (I'm against DRM, won't buy DRM'ed things to keep, I record some over the air TV and buy CDs [CDs have better quality than MP3s])
Correction: it's a(n) MOOC not MOOCS ;)