But might not C&P...

...actually give the banks the exact proof they need to say, "The customer must've done it. There's proof of the chip, and the PINs match up."?

Question.

What should society do with the truly unemployables? Those who have betrayed the public trust and are declared unsuitable for society? It's something I've wondered about--what is society supposed to do with the REJECTS?

Certainly can't let them roam free, possibly find a loophole to exploit the public dole and probably turn to a life of crime. Forget shooting the losers, as the UK cannot execute. Lock them up for life where they could congregate, scheme, and possibly stage a catastrophic breakout?

Speaking of the Sten Gun...

"Rather than make "neato machine guns" - that technologically speaking, are really nice pieces of work, they opted for the Sten Gun, made from a bed spring and exhaust pipe - that could be made soooooooooooo very cheaply (like $2 each) in huge numbers, on very very limited machinery, by very few people, and most of the manufacturing was from pressed sheet metal toy makers, of which at the time, England had a great many."

Even America thought about the costs of war in World War II. Rather than order a lot of those tried-and-true-but-expensive Thompson SMGs (you know, the ones the gangsters put to good use around the 20's and 30's), they took a page from the England playbook, saw how the Sten was made, and came up with something they could make on the cheap: the M3 "Grease Gun". A fine example of the KISS principle applied to war. A fraction of the cost of a Tommy Gun and quick and easy to make. The range wasn't that great, but if you're in a city or wooded setting (which was noted to be common in the European theater), range isn't your biggest concern. And it worked: more than half a million of them were made, and they served their duty.

Besides...

One important word was left out of the repeated diatribe "There is no known defense against a ballistic missile." That word is "YET".

And unless it can be physically proven that a ballistic missile cannot possibly be intercepted (which I doubt--the contrary is more likely provable), then the threat will likely be addressed in the near future: probably through some sort of anti-missile designed to get it going down. It's much more difficult to alter course going down without going off-target, and an anti-missile with the right warhead (think something like an annular ring) doesn't have to hit head-on to shred it or even send it off course.

Ask this: How does GOOGLE make money?

Because they work on similar principles. They let the users roam free because it is the user actions and input that they're really selling. They collect all the data for nothing and then turn around and sell it for bookoo bucks. You can't put a percentage to THAT kind of profit. Why do stores give away frequent shopper cards for free? Because they use them to tap shopping habits--same story. And the advertisers (who are having a devil of a time getting through increasingly-savvy people who learn how to filter out more and more ads) will pay good money for those key words that will get them into a consumer's face.

He HAD contaminated the backups.

If you read the article in full, you realize that the logic bomb had slept for long enough to creep into the backups. Only later did it go off. When they tried to restore the backup, they restored the logic bomb with it, which went off. It was only through extensive tweaking that they were able to defuse the logic bomb from a backup and restore the system.

I half-agree.

Replacing every unit wholesale would be a start, provided it was from a different place than that which supplied the faulty units.

But you can't always trust checksums. Smart crooks may find ways to tweak their code to produce simple checksum collisions. Now, if the code has tougher or multiple signing, that may be a more difficult nut to crack.

Still has a few problems.

LCDs aren't nearly as transmissive as e-ink (LCD displays don't look as white in the sun). Plus they're polarized, which makes them difficult to see if you happen to be wearing polarized (think driver's anti-glare) glasses.

Nice thing about the US.

Americans, with their liberal English language and high cultural diversity, actually make use of so many phonemes that taking samples from them can actually cover quite a few bases in and of itself. It's part of what makes learning American English as a second language so difficult: we accommodate too easily.

Not a lot of acidic waste.

The most common source of acid waste is from mining and rock cutting. Last I checked, there aren't a lot of significant sources of acid mine/rock drainage near Hungary (the closest ones I know are in Spain). There's also the fact this drainage is pretty complex stuff. Mixing with caustic soda can be unpredictable.

Not yet.

There IS a need for some expediency right now, but most of it has been properly directed at keeping people out of harm's way, keeping the problem from spreading too much...and with keeping the stuff flowing into the Danube from being too alkaline (one tributary seems to be toast, but the effort on the Danube itself is proceeding; nothing long-term is expected as long as they keep pace). Once the immediate situation is done and dusted, everyone can take a deep breath, go, "Okay, that's over with," and start laying out the plans for dealing with the mud, which doesn't have to proceed so quickly.

Not really.

After all, you'd be in the Gulf..which means you'd be in WATER. As machine gunners and PC overclocking enthusiasts will tell you, a nice supply of water can do wonders when you have a heat problem.

Far too late.

Game makers have already latched onto CUDA for physics processing, and there's always Folding@home, one of the first mainstream efforts to prove that you CAN do something non-graphically productive with a GPU.

Not going away anytime soon.

They're just shrinking. Even with a move to solid-state I/O such as flash there will still be a considerable (in terms of the CPU) delay when accessing the I/O. This would simply call for a few tweaks and revisions in O/S time management.

He said MPEG, not MPEG-2

And H.264 is also known as MPEG-4 AVC, which means H.264 is still MPEG (MPEG-4 Part 10).

Microsoft didn't go all the way.

They made WDP royalty-free, yes, but they never allowed others to tinker with it. This is the difference-maker with Google's effort. They're going all the way and OPEN-SOURCING the entire works (and if they use the same license as WebM, it'll be based off the well-recognized BSD license). This means it's open season and anyone with good ideas can improve on it.

Okay...

...now, as my previous post stated, where do you store all that lead? And if the assault is sustained, there's still the distinct possibility of running out of ammo.

Don't be so sure.

Rather tricky things, bullets. Especially when trying to score on a moving target whilst *yourself* moving. And unlike in the air, you also have the additional obstacle of the water, which has been demonstrated to do quite a number to a .50-cal round. Worse yet, bullets tend to go down (thanks to gravity) as they fly. So you're talking hitting a relatively small target in flight and low to the water. Not Easy, especially if your time is limited, as it might if you have to deal with multiple craft. Looking back to the kamikaze attacks of World War II (and to bee swarms), a similar swarm, especially low to the water, could be a recipe for trouble (even today) if they come in sufficiently large numbers.

And one last thing: ships may really have more important things to stow aboard than tons of .50-cal ammo. If you're a carrier, you have the planes and their weapons to consider. If you're not, there's always the big-gun ammo and their charges...and the fuel.

They work like the glasses.

Both techs try to shoot differing images to each eye. With the glasses, they shoot both pictures at once and let the glasses (either through shutters or polarization) sort them out. Without them, they send the images at highly-focused angles so that, in the right positions, each eye sees the proper image. That said, either tech could still play hobnob with your head for the reason you describe. The sense of depth is *forced*, for the most part. In a proper 3D scene, the eye can naturally focus to whatever depth we desire. For example, we might focus on something in the distance and the close-up stuff blurs. We refocus close-up, and the reverse happens. That doesn't happen with either system. For many people, the brain notices this lack of accommodation and "can't compute." The result: a headache not unlike what happens in the initial bouts of motion sickness.

Then who's shooting the Americans...

...and coming up with the cleverer tactics?

Perhaps it's not Al Queda itself (who are now mostly in Pakistan where they can't be reached by an army), but from the very article you posted, "Gen. David Petraeus says affiliated organizations still have 'enclaves and sanctuaries' in the country." So Al Queda's still got lots of friends, and they need to be dealt with just as Al Queda itself. Plus it doesn't defuse the fact that Al Queda has shown a desire to attack the US even before we started trooping into foreign soil. An opponent like that needs to be continually pressured so as to keep them from coming around back at you.

PNG

PNG is overtaking GIF for lossless still pictures because it's not patent-encumbered and provides better compression (Deflate vs. LZW). Although newer lossless compressions have emerged (such as LZMA), most require more resources to implement (LZMA, for example, is memory-intensive) and are not recommended due to the fact that some web browsers have resource limits.

As for animated PNGs, they're still arguing over the matter. It's currently between MNG and APNG, and it may take a while longer for the dust to settle. Plus there's the possibility of the whole thing being moot thanks to things like Flash and web video.

Safari and Mozilla are already in.

Safari uses WebKit, so they'll be among the first to implement WebP.

And as the article states, Mozilla is already collaborating on the project, so they're interested, too. Once the standard's nailed down, expect an update to include support for it (perhaps even Mozilla's helping to push the standard in time for the 4.0 release).

Wrong War.

You're thinking about Iraq, and we're actually pretty much winding down there. The big problem is Afghanistan where there is a known enemy (Al Queda) that is known to have committed acts of atrocity against Americans on American soil (which we need not mention), which have vowed to commit more given half a chance (heck, I think they'd rather destroy the world than lose--so MAD doesn't faze them), and which have said they're pretty much in it for the long haul. So you have a sworn intractable enemy who's already struck on your home ground. SOMETHING needs to be done, but it's just a different kind of war, and it's tricky to adapt.

Question.

What if the laptop <em>was</em> the navigator? Laptops can be loaded with map software and be connected to USB- or COM-connected GPS receivers. I've considered the idea myself but, perhaps like this driver, can't think of an elegant solution in terms of placement.

Interesting thought...

Especially the 1B idea of making solid-state storage into a form of directly-addressable NVRAM. SInce there is already forms of memory-mapped file addressing, this would work as a logical extension.

Especially in 64-bit computing, you could probably set aside a chunk of address space and declare it to be memory-mapped NVRAM (perhaps the region defined as those having bit #32 on--it is currently in a no-allocate zone to allow for more streamlined memory implementation) like you do for the hardware.

And they'd counter...

...that without moderation and due concern, we could easily blindly step off a proverbial cliff. They'll give you lots of examples of supposed miracles that proved later to be devils in disguise: radium glow-in-the-dark displays, DDT, thalidomide, and so on. They probably keep a laundry list of such technological blunders and probably keep a choice few that, had they proceeded, might have caused irreparable or catastrophic harm to the human race, the planet, or both.

Any von Neumann CPU, actually.

Any CPU of the von Neumann school (which is not just Intel CPUs but many others) is by definition capable of turning data into code and vice versa. Indeed, Just-In-Time Compilation relies on this principle. That's why JIT compilers fall flat in Harvard architectures.

Sounds like the same yeast...

...used for Samuel Adams Utopias. They mentioned breeding a yeast specifically to survive the higher alcohol content. Oh, and for good measure, Utopias is aged in barrels.

That's $15 DAY ONE...

...if you absolute, positively, must have it NOW (and $25 for BluRay). Yes, I know the price drops after a few weeks, and that actually makes "buy" even more tempting vs. "rent". Plus, secondhand markets love them because they're more durable. They can make a nice bargain buy if you want the movie but don't insist on the box being pristine since the meat of it, the movie, still plays the same (barring scratch glitches--bloody difficult in a scratch-guarded BluRay--on the 1000th viewing as it did the 1st).

BTW, I actually live in a city...one full of Hollywood corpses (the Movie Gallery corpses got recycled some years back). My personal experience with myriad Blockbusters (the ones that are still open--some have already shut down) show them to be clean and well-maintained but still with clear signs of financial distress (mainly lots of clearance stock), and like I said, practically all of the indies disappeared before even Movie Gallery did. I think there's only one left, in fact: a two-store business that I think gets by because its "fetish" section (including "toys") is bigger than its mainstream section. Perhaps a strong video-on-demand presence (my area's served by Cox Communications, a company that caught on pretty early to digital expansion) kept the bar too high.

nVidia and ATI thought outside the box.

What they found was that parallel computation has plenty of uses outside gaming (look at Folding@home; their strongest contributions come from GPUs). Where GPUs excel is what is called "stream computing": essentially, repetitive independent calculations which are ripe for parallelization (if you think the 4-way multitasking of modern quad-core CPUs is hot, GPUs can divide tasks 32 ways or more). Plus in terms of raw computational horsepower, GPUs have CPUs licked (the top-end cards are reaching teraFLOP levels in single-precision--a double-precision teraFLOP GPU device is only a matter of time).

BTW, there's serious uses for graphical computation, too. Think climate and weather modeling, physics simulations, and other forms of "what if" modeling. GPU computations can even help with professional ray tracing and similar forms of advanced 3D modeling (not to the realtime level yet, but they can still seriously cut down rendering times).

Easy.

They just need to stand on a highly insulated box and make the cut when it isn't raining. Now they're no longer earthed, and they won't conduct the current so long as they only make single-point approaches to the goods.

Graphical Processing Unit

Essentially a processor built originally around the specialized computational needs of 3D graphics. Thanks to advanced from nVidia and ATI, they've become more generalized and have become extremely useful processors outside the graphics realm. The things that give it a boost to rendering (mainly a high capacity for parallel processing) are also of use in various related mathematical problems: particularly those, like graphic rendering, that involve doing a lot of independent but similar calculations quickly.

Did you know...

There is a quaint little community on Long Island...called Amityville. Ring any bells?

IF they're still around.

Indie movie rental places were among the first to collapse. Not even adult video rentals do well--the Internet provided a quicker and more discrete channel for those tastes. Where I live, there are only two places you can rent videos: redbox and Blockbuster, and I hadn't been holding my breath on the latter since Movie Gallery collapsed.

Of the stores you listed...

...Blockbuster is actually the last. Most of the mom-and-pops and small fry collapsed soon after 9/11: mostly because higher-quality and longer-lasting DVDs became so cheap it became better to buy than to rent. Movie Gallery/Hollywood Video finally gave up earlier this year (their skeletal remains still litter my hometown), and looking at their numbers back in April, I had given them a year at most since they had the same problems that caused Movie Gallery to fail.

And it's the thing I agree about your comment: they're no longer meaningful in today's world. Don't know about Netflix or Video-on-Demand, but I feel the $15 new DVD at Walmart killed the rental business.

Think of it like this.

The ISPs are the ones who provide the content to both the users and the content providers. If they can't get more address space to handle their increasing number of customers, what happens when a user or provider wants an IP address and the provider doesn't have any to provide?

And before you say just put the users behind NATs, do you know what's one of the user's greatest frustrations about NAT? Talking to a user *behind another NAT*. If a user is behind a NAT, particularly one not under his/her control (which would be the case if the ISP hosts the NAT), then picking up something from another user behind a different NAT (especially in a protocol where an intermediary is discouraged) is going to be bloody difficult.

This is one reason the people behind IPv6 are against NAT--they want machines (that are public-facing) to be directly addressable over the IPv6 internet for the sake of simplicity.

Too expensive?

Players are now available at less than $100, and discs can be had for as little as $10...NEW. I wouldn't be too surprised in the near future (say within two years) for a movie company to release a movie ONLY in BluRay. That'll be the first sign of the inevitable transition. Then it'll either be go BluRay or go Without.

But a lease usually has a key element...

...pen to paper. Most rentals, leases, etc. are contracts that include signatures. ALL the terms are spelled out and agreed to before the transaction takes place. Furthermore, the transaction is usually direct between supplier (or via a legally-designated representative) and client. Going through a retail channel tends to murk that water significantly. So does the lack of pen-to-paper (or some EXPLICIT consent) that would normally be required to make the contract legally binding.

Simple.

As long as a nonzero exists in a further decimal place, a zero can exist as a decimal digit.

Fine example: 1/1000 in decimal is 0.001. Note the two zero decimals, which are both valid and necessary.

They already are unrealistic.

And that's part of the reason many people get headaches when watching "stereoscopic" movies (perhaps the more proper term for them). Stereoscopic vision is just part of the system that allows us to perceive in three dimensions, but by abusing the system and not allowing for the rest of the works to, um, work (for example, you can't adjust the focus of the scene like you can in real life), the brain begins to go spare and we start to get the initial traces of "simulation sickness".

To answer your question...

The ARM7 is von Neumann; the ARM9 is Harvard.

Just-In-Time Compilation is a modern case which Harvard architectures can't handle, either. Basically, any program that builds or modifies code to be executed on the fly (IOW, a program that necessarily blurs the code/data divide) cannot work in a Harvard architecture.

So if it gets referred to the entire panel...

...it may put them in a dilemma, since you would imagine Vernor and/or his attorneys will use the book angle next. The entire Court of Appeals would have to declare either shrinkwrap licenses unenforceable...or most libraries in breach of copyright.