Because nothing says 'I trust you darling' like a mattress which informs you if they're having sex on it behind your back. I mean, seriously, if she knows (and do the gender swap in your head if you need to), what's wrong with getting banged on the sofa, or up the stairs, or over the kitchen worktop?
NASA don't pay they guy hovering over the "SHUT IT ALL DOWN" button: the NSA and CIA do.
As for the failure to hit the SHUT IT ALL DOWN button, in a hidden ex-employee processing centre on an unknown island, and ex-NSA operative is having his memory erased.
They were smart enough, but they trusted NSA's conspiracy-with-aliens department when it said that there was no reason to worry. As mentioned above, the result is a few soon-to-be-ex-employees quickly moved to overseas assignments where their memories are erased, and reasons for dismissal injected, prior to formal disciplinary dismissal proceedings.
If in doubt, ask a member of the NSA's conspiracy-with-aliens department, and remember to run away and hide before they erase your mind.;-)
It is harder to learn a discipline than pass a test in said discipline. Passing said test is easier if you know it's nature in advance. In the case of speed reading, you may be able to grasp certain salient details of a novel by skimming, but I would like to see that done with a maths textbook: speed read an undergraduate textbook in a subject you have not studied yet, and answer exercise questions on the topic. That kind of thing takes thinking through, as does recognising any subtlety to a novel rather than just the superficially obvious plot. But if the test probes nothing other than the superficially obvious plot, it will not pick this up.
Many CD players, for example, use 1-bit DACs. These turn the PCM signal into a stream of bits where the average density corresponds to the signal. I would imagine you could construct circuits to process things like images of video where the average 'pressure or density' of bits output would be the meaningful output.
Even if emirps and taxicab numbers are not useful for anything, the techniques developed in proofs of assertions about things have a habit of being useful elsewhere, and the mere pondering of such things is good exercise for mathematical reasoning, and fun for those who like maths. That fun aspect should not be underrated: if you don't enjoy maths, you will tend to limit yourself only to that which has an immediately obvious usefulness. Read up on the history of maths to see how that could be a problem.
Hobbling the default rm command slightly would make a sense, possibly having a second command (oblit or something) for the really nasty stuff, would make sense. Many commands can be unnecessarily destructive, and those destructive commands are too easy to invoke by accident. Possibly requiring a --really and a --reallyreally switch on rm to enable things like rm -rf crossing filesystems, would make sense. I did once make a quick hack so that rm -rf would require an environment variable to be set in order to work, but then various scripts broke.
You can create end-to-end encrypted apps in html5 and javascript. Provided phones don't have logs of everything the user does, whatever the manufacturers do will not achieve much.
Discrimination need not necessarily be morally wrong. Law should respect morality, not define it. When there is genuine reason to discriminate (and places like medicine present the most obvious set of examples), it is morally ok, and should be legally ok to discriminate. When strict non-discrimination has undesirable side-effects, such as putting women at risk, again the morally right thing is to have a limited amount of discrimination, but no more than is reasonably necessary. The law probably doesn't work quite like this, but that is a failing of the law and the men who wrote it.
In taking carbon from the ocean and dumping it into the air as CO2, without a corresponding step to move it back to the ocean when used, it is not carbon neutral.
What Windows and OS X lack, by comparison, is an easy way to control configuration using only a command line and a text editor, possibly via a ssh connection. It could be done better by both, but even if a better approach appeared, inertial would still limit uptake. That said, I find being forced to use the 'left a bit... up a bit... down a bit... yes that one!' paradigm (the impatient person wanting to do everything by pointing) quite an annoyance at times. I prefer to keep my hands on the keyboard, and like to be able to move between machines with ease. When things are GUI only, it is very limiting.
Copyright law is already too biased towards producers. They are behaving like spoilt little children and need their toys to be taken away. Seriously, they get enough (more than enough) already.
Unless you have entered into a contractual arrangement with a website, it is up to you how your browser works. If that browser does not display ads, that is up to the user. If the user wants to run a greasemonkey script, that is up to the user. If a website wishes otherwise, it needs to have users sign up to a legally enforceable contract which stipulates how they use the site. That this is too much like hard work for both users and hosts is not the users' problem. (As for copyright legislation, I do think that needs to be fixed so as to regulate distributing copies from one person to another only.)
For real twisted fun, consider running wine on the resulting GNU/Linux/Win64 OS. This would, however, allow for Windows developers to easily test and adapt their software to work better with wine. The other interesting thing would be the opposite, namely a port of Windows to run as a proprietary program on Linux.
Think http://www.colinux.org/ -- basically porting the kernel to run on Windows rather than bare hardware, and use Windows process management and scheduling etc. Then making a few tweaks to the low level libraries and building stuff on the resulting platform.
Real world problem solving is important, especially as a way to motivate learning. I often illustrate factorisation (and distributivity) with a shopping example:
You want cornflakes for breakfast. So, each day you: 1) Go to the shop 2) Buy milk 3) Go home again 4) Go to the shop 5) Buy cornflakes 6) Go home again 7) Go to the shop 8) Buy sugar 9) Go home again 10) Eat cornflakes
I then point out that nobody would do this, one sensible improvement being: 1) Go to the shop 2) Buy milk, sugar and cornflakes (in one transaction) 3) Go home again 4) Eat cornflakes
And then to do what everybody actually does in practice 1) Go the the shop 2) Buy a reasonably sized box of cornflakes, a pack of sugar, and a few pints of milk 3) Go home again 4) Eat cornflakes for the next few days
Each time there is a saving of effort. What is going on here is that we are taking something like G(c)+G(s)+G(m), turning it into G(c+s+m), and then into G(4c+4s+4m). Explained this way, there is a natural connection with both what happens in maths (where the notation is a natural shorthand) and in computer programming (when you are rearranging loops or refactoring functions). It is sensible to use real world problems with little mathematical language to teach people these processes and, once they are familiar with the process, teach them common standard languages for expressing them succinctly. The need to be succint and general can then be motivated by other problems involving one person telling another how to solve a problem, and how to recognise a problem.
Maths as we have it, is both a collection of knowledge about abstract reasoning about abstract objects, and a language for communicating that language. Just as natural languages have arts developed around their communication, such as poetry, song and theatre, we need similar artistry with regards to _how_ we communicate in STEM, not merely a myopic obsession with discovering new stuff.
I have a couple of smartphones: an HTC One M7 (which can decode sphere mapped stereo videos with 4k x 1.5k res in hardware, but can only do about 5fps), and a newer cheaper smartphone with a full HD screen, and which can only hw decode lower resolution and has inaccurate jumpy gyroscope. I would imagine that things like the Omimo headset are something to watch for in future (where you can either connect to a PC, or stick an sd card with the 3d movie into it and have it play that. But I think we need to let the hardware side mature for a couple of years, and indeed the filming tech. That said, this is probably a far more productive avenue for them to explore than 4k, though 4k porn with interactive zoom (with or without side by side for a headset) would, again, be something to look out for.
In all these cases, I can see porn blazing a trail in many areas, and other niches of video following them in (for example videos of sports out of the mainstream -- imagine having a 3d 120fps recording of something like a squash match, though tech for this sort of thing isn't there yet). In addition, with regards to the free vs. pay model that is emerging, this is something the entire content industry needs to watch. I think the porn industry is learning that there needs to be sufficient free material to satisfy demand somewhat so as to alleviate the pressure to pirate, and high quality paid material for those willing to pay a little (and at present, for what you can get for about $100, it really is only a little).
I imagine I would be identified by my hardly using the mouse. I tend to use the keyboard unless I have to use the pointer. In addition, if I had a touchscreen, I would be using that where possible. But the basic fix in the browser is something like we see with Android, but on a per-site basis: if your javascript wants access to timing information, it needs explicit permission.
I remember piano and synth apps that would kill battery life (way back when when I actually used an iOS device). But the assertion of the Apple guy seems tantamount to an assertion that apps which continue running in the background don't use the battery. I don't buy that.
Since 16.04 is LTS, if they don't drop catalyst, they are committing to supporting an OS with it for a while. Most likely AMDGPU drivers will be good enough well before the LTS release reaches EOL.
Back with the PS3, you had a novel processor (Cell) and the PS3 was a cheap way to get machines with it. With the PS4, you have a mid range AMD APU processor. Newer APUs will probably outperform it in raw performance terms, and clustering will be easier with commodity hardware.
This is why OS architectures like Qubes are important. This is why Linux systems (and everything else) should work more like that. It is also why the principle of least authority needs to make its way out of textbooks and into real life. Malware like this can work because it is given permission to work. There is no reason things need to be that way, except for laziness of programmers.
This is another attack on the owner/user's ability to control what their computer does. Banning ad-blocking effectively means that as soon as I type a URL in and hit enter, I give unconditional control of a number of aspects of my browser over to the server, and if the author of the content on the server abuses that position, I am not allowed to do anything about it. The client/server arrangement on the web is one of trust. That trust can be abused in various ways. If a website expects ad revenue to fund itself, and users deny it that revenue, that is a problem from the point of view of the content provider, but if the website uses adverts excessively (for example so that various sites are no-go areas of you are on a mobile broadband link with a relatively small cap), then that is an abuse of the control handed to the website by the user. I long for a simple, honest web, but have no real hope of seeing much of one in the near future.
Slashdot Mirror
Because nothing says 'I trust you darling' like a mattress which informs you if they're having sex on it behind your back. I mean, seriously, if she knows (and do the gender swap in your head if you need to), what's wrong with getting banged on the sofa, or up the stairs, or over the kitchen worktop?
NASA don't pay they guy hovering over the "SHUT IT ALL DOWN" button: the NSA and CIA do.
As for the failure to hit the SHUT IT ALL DOWN button, in a hidden ex-employee processing centre on an unknown island, and ex-NSA operative is having his memory erased.
They were smart enough, but they trusted NSA's conspiracy-with-aliens department when it said that there was no reason to worry. As mentioned above, the result is a few soon-to-be-ex-employees quickly moved to overseas assignments where their memories are erased, and reasons for dismissal injected, prior to formal disciplinary dismissal proceedings.
If in doubt, ask a member of the NSA's conspiracy-with-aliens department, and remember to run away and hide before they erase your mind. ;-)
It is harder to learn a discipline than pass a test in said discipline. Passing said test is easier if you know it's nature in advance. In the case of speed reading, you may be able to grasp certain salient details of a novel by skimming, but I would like to see that done with a maths textbook: speed read an undergraduate textbook in a subject you have not studied yet, and answer exercise questions on the topic. That kind of thing takes thinking through, as does recognising any subtlety to a novel rather than just the superficially obvious plot. But if the test probes nothing other than the superficially obvious plot, it will not pick this up.
Many CD players, for example, use 1-bit DACs. These turn the PCM signal into a stream of bits where the average density corresponds to the signal. I would imagine you could construct circuits to process things like images of video where the average 'pressure or density' of bits output would be the meaningful output.
Even if emirps and taxicab numbers are not useful for anything, the techniques developed in proofs of assertions about things have a habit of being useful elsewhere, and the mere pondering of such things is good exercise for mathematical reasoning, and fun for those who like maths. That fun aspect should not be underrated: if you don't enjoy maths, you will tend to limit yourself only to that which has an immediately obvious usefulness. Read up on the history of maths to see how that could be a problem.
Hobbling the default rm command slightly would make a sense, possibly having a second command (oblit or something) for the really nasty stuff, would make sense. Many commands can be unnecessarily destructive, and those destructive commands are too easy to invoke by accident. Possibly requiring a --really and a --reallyreally switch on rm to enable things like rm -rf crossing filesystems, would make sense. I did once make a quick hack so that rm -rf would require an environment variable to be set in order to work, but then various scripts broke.
Unless those terms also exist in the licenses for earlier versions, it is no help: one cannot legally run OSX Lion in a VM on an El Capitan machine.
You can create end-to-end encrypted apps in html5 and javascript. Provided phones don't have logs of everything the user does, whatever the manufacturers do will not achieve much.
Discrimination need not necessarily be morally wrong. Law should respect morality, not define it. When there is genuine reason to discriminate (and places like medicine present the most obvious set of examples), it is morally ok, and should be legally ok to discriminate. When strict non-discrimination has undesirable side-effects, such as putting women at risk, again the morally right thing is to have a limited amount of discrimination, but no more than is reasonably necessary. The law probably doesn't work quite like this, but that is a failing of the law and the men who wrote it.
In taking carbon from the ocean and dumping it into the air as CO2, without a corresponding step to move it back to the ocean when used, it is not carbon neutral.
What Windows and OS X lack, by comparison, is an easy way to control configuration using only a command line and a text editor, possibly via a ssh connection. It could be done better by both, but even if a better approach appeared, inertial would still limit uptake. That said, I find being forced to use the 'left a bit... up a bit... down a bit... yes that one!' paradigm (the impatient person wanting to do everything by pointing) quite an annoyance at times. I prefer to keep my hands on the keyboard, and like to be able to move between machines with ease. When things are GUI only, it is very limiting.
Copyright law is already too biased towards producers. They are behaving like spoilt little children and need their toys to be taken away. Seriously, they get enough (more than enough) already.
Unless you have entered into a contractual arrangement with a website, it is up to you how your browser works. If that browser does not display ads, that is up to the user. If the user wants to run a greasemonkey script, that is up to the user. If a website wishes otherwise, it needs to have users sign up to a legally enforceable contract which stipulates how they use the site. That this is too much like hard work for both users and hosts is not the users' problem. (As for copyright legislation, I do think that needs to be fixed so as to regulate distributing copies from one person to another only.)
For real twisted fun, consider running wine on the resulting GNU/Linux/Win64 OS. This would, however, allow for Windows developers to easily test and adapt their software to work better with wine. The other interesting thing would be the opposite, namely a port of Windows to run as a proprietary program on Linux.
Think http://www.colinux.org/ -- basically porting the kernel to run on Windows rather than bare hardware, and use Windows process management and scheduling etc. Then making a few tweaks to the low level libraries and building stuff on the resulting platform.
Real world problem solving is important, especially as a way to motivate learning. I often illustrate factorisation (and distributivity) with a shopping example:
You want cornflakes for breakfast. So, each day you:
1) Go to the shop
2) Buy milk
3) Go home again
4) Go to the shop
5) Buy cornflakes
6) Go home again
7) Go to the shop
8) Buy sugar
9) Go home again
10) Eat cornflakes
I then point out that nobody would do this, one sensible improvement being:
1) Go to the shop
2) Buy milk, sugar and cornflakes (in one transaction)
3) Go home again
4) Eat cornflakes
And then to do what everybody actually does in practice
1) Go the the shop
2) Buy a reasonably sized box of cornflakes, a pack of sugar, and a few pints of milk
3) Go home again
4) Eat cornflakes for the next few days
Each time there is a saving of effort. What is going on here is that we are taking something like G(c)+G(s)+G(m), turning it into G(c+s+m), and then into G(4c+4s+4m). Explained this way, there is a natural connection with both what happens in maths (where the notation is a natural shorthand) and in computer programming (when you are rearranging loops or refactoring functions). It is sensible to use real world problems with little mathematical language to teach people these processes and, once they are familiar with the process, teach them common standard languages for expressing them succinctly. The need to be succint and general can then be motivated by other problems involving one person telling another how to solve a problem, and how to recognise a problem.
Maths as we have it, is both a collection of knowledge about abstract reasoning about abstract objects, and a language for communicating that language. Just as natural languages have arts developed around their communication, such as poetry, song and theatre, we need similar artistry with regards to _how_ we communicate in STEM, not merely a myopic obsession with discovering new stuff.
I have a couple of smartphones: an HTC One M7 (which can decode sphere mapped stereo videos with 4k x 1.5k res in hardware, but can only do about 5fps), and a newer cheaper smartphone with a full HD screen, and which can only hw decode lower resolution and has inaccurate jumpy gyroscope. I would imagine that things like the Omimo headset are something to watch for in future (where you can either connect to a PC, or stick an sd card with the 3d movie into it and have it play that. But I think we need to let the hardware side mature for a couple of years, and indeed the filming tech. That said, this is probably a far more productive avenue for them to explore than 4k, though 4k porn with interactive zoom (with or without side by side for a headset) would, again, be something to look out for.
In all these cases, I can see porn blazing a trail in many areas, and other niches of video following them in (for example videos of sports out of the mainstream -- imagine having a 3d 120fps recording of something like a squash match, though tech for this sort of thing isn't there yet). In addition, with regards to the free vs. pay model that is emerging, this is something the entire content industry needs to watch. I think the porn industry is learning that there needs to be sufficient free material to satisfy demand somewhat so as to alleviate the pressure to pirate, and high quality paid material for those willing to pay a little (and at present, for what you can get for about $100, it really is only a little).
They seem to be learning the meaning of 'Democratic' from the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.
I often describe Artificial Intelligence as the discipline of using computation means to duplicate tasks that otherwise required human intelligence.
I imagine I would be identified by my hardly using the mouse. I tend to use the keyboard unless I have to use the pointer. In addition, if I had a touchscreen, I would be using that where possible. But the basic fix in the browser is something like we see with Android, but on a per-site basis: if your javascript wants access to timing information, it needs explicit permission.
I remember piano and synth apps that would kill battery life (way back when when I actually used an iOS device). But the assertion of the Apple guy seems tantamount to an assertion that apps which continue running in the background don't use the battery. I don't buy that.
Since 16.04 is LTS, if they don't drop catalyst, they are committing to supporting an OS with it for a while. Most likely AMDGPU drivers will be good enough well before the LTS release reaches EOL.
Back with the PS3, you had a novel processor (Cell) and the PS3 was a cheap way to get machines with it. With the PS4, you have a mid range AMD APU processor. Newer APUs will probably outperform it in raw performance terms, and clustering will be easier with commodity hardware.
This is why OS architectures like Qubes are important. This is why Linux systems (and everything else) should work more like that. It is also why the principle of least authority needs to make its way out of textbooks and into real life. Malware like this can work because it is given permission to work. There is no reason things need to be that way, except for laziness of programmers.
This is another attack on the owner/user's ability to control what their computer does. Banning ad-blocking effectively means that as soon as I type a URL in and hit enter, I give unconditional control of a number of aspects of my browser over to the server, and if the author of the content on the server abuses that position, I am not allowed to do anything about it. The client/server arrangement on the web is one of trust. That trust can be abused in various ways. If a website expects ad revenue to fund itself, and users deny it that revenue, that is a problem from the point of view of the content provider, but if the website uses adverts excessively (for example so that various sites are no-go areas of you are on a mobile broadband link with a relatively small cap), then that is an abuse of the control handed to the website by the user. I long for a simple, honest web, but have no real hope of seeing much of one in the near future.