Posts by Suricou Raven 1643 publicly visible posts • joined 20 Jun 2007
"so that it makes some sense to expose the main memory to the GPU processors, "
Until some OEM has a flashback and recalls that they can just dump all the GPU memory entirely and use main memory for the card instead, thus allowing them to sell a cheap-GPU machine while fiddling the specs.
They do have quite the persecution complex. The American ones especially. It's a recurring theme in the Christian media I follow for entertainment. Anything can be persecution.
The biggest one right now is non-discrimination laws - some states have laws that prohibit businesses from discriminating based on sexual orientation of their customers or employees. Or, as the Christian press describes it, anti-Christian laws that 'criminalize those who take a biblical stance on human sexuality.'
That was CFCs.
These are HFCs.
They are actually remarkably safe and only slightly damaging to the environment, which makes them the go-to replacements for CFCs.
If you can get them fully fluorinated, they are near-indestructable chemically. That fluorine-carbon bond takes a silly amount of energy to break, so they just won't react. That's how Teflon works.
If physical crime was treated like cyber-crime:
- A thief breaks through your flimsy front door and makes off with the £10 you left nearby to pay the window-cleaners with.
- You spend £3000 getting a new steel-reenforced door professionally fitted with two locks, those slidy things top and bottom, and a lock McGuyver would struggle to pick.
- The thief is now liable for £3010.
1. Comey will say some things that suggest Trump is a general ass and abused his power to try to cut short a potentially embarrassing investigation, and values loyalty to himself above anything else, but stop short of any actual claim of criminality.
2. Trump will tweet something stupid about 'fake news.'
3. Almost all Republicans - both the actual politicians and their popular supporters - will remain rallied behind Trump regardless and dismiss any accusations as a Democratic scheme. In politics, especially the US variety, party is everything. They might complain about him in private, but they won't turn on their own leader.
4. Democrats will make many loud noises, but won't actually take any action, because they know the only action they can take is to try for impeachment - an attempt which is doomed to fail, due to point 3.
At the end of the day the Republicans will regard the Democrats as treasonous liars who should be executed, and Democrats will regard the Republicans as fanatical nutjobs who are kept from becoming dictators only by their own incompetence, and we all remain right where we started. People have already chosen their side, and stand ready to dismiss immediately any claim that might suggest their side is wrong in any aspect.
I'm surprised none of them tried a school. Lots of children packed in close for morning assembly. Practially no security. If you can get a bomb then just walk in and blow, if not then bring your truck to the school run. Not only to you rank up a high kill-count, but targeting children ensures maximum possible public outrage. The angrier the public gets, the most Muslims tend to get randomly assaulted on the street, and the easier it is to convince them to join a holy war in self-defence.
Leave won the referendum by a 2% margin. That's barely a win. Such a close vote would suggest the country wants out of the EU, but should still maintain some level of close ties - perhaps purely economic rather than political.
It was May and the Conservative party who decided that 52% means to abandoned Europe entirely, rule out from day one any chance of close economic union, and burn any bridges leading back.
Marriage has served many purposes. Which purposes these are has varied throughout history. There are certainly many couples who married without love in order to secure alliances between powerful families, but there are also people who gave up much of their wealth and status to marry someone beneath their class whome they loved. Even the occasional royal marrying a commoner.
The importance for child-rearing is somewhat lessened today by the availability of contraception. It is no longer an inevitability that every sexually-active heterosexual couple will produce children, as used to be the case, so there is no longer that need to force them into a long-term legal union to make sure they would have no choice but to combine resources to care for those children.
Everyone wants a soft border. But the single biggest issue driving the leave vote was immigration - legal, illegal, and asylum. If you have a soft border, how is that going to change? Anyone wanting to sneak into the country need only get themselves as far as the RoI as a visitor and can then simply stroll across the border. Ferry to the mainland after optional. The pro-exit forces are going to be very unhappy when they realise just how easy it remains to get in.
I've had three takedowns.
One was actual infringement - of a cartoon from 1928, which at the time was not available through legitimate channels, and which I'd used to practice by video restoration skills.
The second was for a piece of music which, I am absolutely certain, was public domain. It was the backing music for another cartoon, this one predating sound, and contemporary with it. This one was picked up by youtube's automatic music identification thing, on behalf of a collecting agency who had purchased the rights to that piece back when it was actually under copyright, and later inserted the lot into youtube's filters without regard for if it had expired or not. It's interesting that youtube has no procedures in place to handle this situation: You cannot file a complaint or request a review, such an option is just not available in the drop-down box.
The third was a textbook case of fair use in which I used a few short clips, totaling maybe thirty seconds, from a pokemon episode in order to make fun of certain scenes which could be interpreted in ways the producers did not intend. The entire episode had been uploaded by several other youtube accounts without consequence, so I think my vulgar humor may have offended someone at the studio personally.
And do what about it? Declare cyber-war? Fire the nukes?
There's only one thing which can be done, and that is what is being done: Try to improve security, send a strongly-worded letter via the UN condemning the hacks, ignore the inevitable denials, and maybe impose some sanctions that will make the common people miserable but do nothing to harm those who are in charge.
The last time Russia decided to invade a country they did so by first using some highly skilled political manipulations and organised propaganda campaigns. When the need for military action came the ground was so well-prepared that their troops were able to simply stroll into Crimea with barely a shot fired - and officially still in a state where there was no formal war and their presence could be denied. Faced with a lack of support from the rest of Ukraine due to the aforementioned political manipulations the defenders mostly surrendered, allowing Russia to secure control with a minimum of resources expended. They then proceeded to establish a government effective enough to maintain peace, and embarked on a well-run campaign to win the support of the people through both open means such as investment in infrastructure and more repressive means including controlling the media and ensuring critics of the new regime were removed from positions of influence.
Now compare that to the total clusterfuck that was the US's invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.
Sorry, but while I have to oppose Russia on the grounds of being an oppressive tyranical regime bent on world domination, I still must admit: They are *good* at it.
"When you enable packet prioritization for a fee, for example, so long as it only marginally affects the normal flow of unprioritized traffic, the ISPs can use the extra revenue to improve their services overall (which they will)"
No, they won't, because if their non-priority traffic is a good enough service then why would anyone pay for priority? It creates a perverse incentive, in which ISPs soon realise it is in their best interests to refrain from upgrading their network in order to protect the prioritisation revenue.
Government is a tool. Free market economics is also a tool. Simply doing nothing can also be a tool, of a sort. You must pick the appropriate tool to use for each specific problem.
You don't get far if you rule out the use of a specific tool for ideological reasons. You can take a screw out with pliers if you have to, but a screwdriver works a lot better.
It won't cost them much. ISPs already have censorship systems in place - they are required for the voluntary* child abuse imagery blocks (BT calls it 'cleanfeed') and to block websites which are subject to a court blocking order. It would not be difficult to just add another set of entries to the list. They can group together to establish an industry body that processes complaints and generates the block list collectively.
*Parliament made it quite clear that if any major ISP doesn't voluntary comply, legislation will be introduced make it no-so-voluntary.
It's getting too late for that now. It could have worked if it was put in place a few years ago, when almost everything on the internet was cleartext. But these days? Encryption is the default for a lot of things. Including this forum. Including all major websites, and most applications too. If you block everything that can't be read, you break the internet to a point that, even in a repressive state, the angry users are going to be a problem.
There are some DRM schemes that work so well that the user doesn't even notice them. Steam comes to mind - DRM, user identification for policing multiplayer games, recommendations and download market all seamlessly integrated.
I do note that all major Steam games can also be torrented though, so obviously it's not an entirely effective DRM system.
The emails have already been gone over. She never sent or received anything classified at the time. There were a few things which were later retroactively classified, but that's about it. A bit of government business discussed, but only at the very vague level of making appointments and directing people to contact her through official channels.
Some of it might technically be illegal, but it's not the treasonable offense that her opponents keep claiming.
Remember that even before the primary campaign starts, the majority of voters have already decided who to vote for: The D or the R. Party loyalties go back generations. They are part of cultural identity, and they are largely unshakable.
That's why a key part of any campaign isn't just to win the undecided voters to your side, it's also to make sure those who already support your party are sufficiently enthused to actually go down to the polling station and do the vote thing.
Plus, as should never be forgotten, Trump actually got fewer votes than Hillary. He won only because of the electoral collage, a system which was established for the sole purpose of ensuring that certain states (ie, mostly southern states with lower population density) would have an influence upon the election disproportionate to their number of voters. He won according to the rules that constitution lays out, but those rules are arcane relics from a time long-past.
You are judging by European standards. To us, Fox is extreme right wing. But by American standards, it's merely right-wing, no extreme. Everything is shifted.
The extreme right-wing are the ones upset that Trump isn't trying to expel all Muslims from the country like he promised, and stockpiling guns and ammo for the time when Obama's secret army rises up, overthrows the government and starts trying to round up Christians for the gas chambers. They are pretty nuts.
Trump using twitter is government business now. He uses it to publicly announce policy positions.
Imagine if someone hacked Trump's phone and got access to the twitter account. What fun could they have? They could swing the stock market however they wanted with ease. They could embarrass the country on a whim. Or just go all-out and announce the US was initiating an immediate invasion of North Korea, then sit back and eat popcorn as they watch NK immediately start shelling Seoul into a smoking crater.
It's worth noting that, prior to the iPad, there had already been numerous portable ultra-portable computing devices. The Psions, iPaqs, even the old Newton. All of which were either dismal failures, or saw adoption only among the tech-loving market or executives looking to show off their business toys. At the time the iPad was introduced, it was reasonable to view it as a risky venture - another attempt to do what had failed many times before. Apple's success was down to a combination of improved technology allowing for a better product and a business model which ensured the product would be at least somewhat useful for the mass market buyer.
Most successful products are foreshadowed by a series of failures, which the designers of the successful product then learn from.
She'll spend weeks on delicate negotiations, then the government will finally get things in gear, appoint an official replacement, and said replacement will then throw it all away in an instant in favor of some policy more aligned with the current American dogma that all regulation is evil.
Hybrid. Diesel engines and batteries. The diesel engines could only run on the surface, as they needed a lot of air, so they'd be used to charge up the batteries. Then when it was time to go stealthy, they'd switch to batteries and dive. They could also run a lot faster on the surface. WWII subs actually didn't go underwater very much - it was only for stealth and attacking, due to the limited dive duration and the reduction in speed.
"I'd hazard a guess someone's got a PHP way for you to HTTPS into a web page and have the server grab the resulting page you type into an address bar in the page"
You mean a CGI proxy. Common services, funded by the adverts they insert into the page - much beloved by school students, as they can be used to get around the web filter and access games. I won't link any here, but it's about thirty seconds on google to find one. I'm sure the free ones log everything though.
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