Exactly! Plenty of people in the world outside the US and Europe would like to be able to legally consume the content. In most situations, the content providers will not provide it to those people, not for ANY price. So some use VPNs, etc to try to get the content that others can get -- and the copyright owners want to shut them out instead of trying to find a way to accept their money. Makes no sense to me.

Well, we don't know the details yet, but your surmise will likely be borne out. Everything is more expensive in the antipodes.

The credit card number does encode the issuing bank, and that determines the currency that the card works in. If I was in country X with a credit card from country Y, I certainly would not use that card to make regular, recurring purchases in country X. Every such transaction would be treated as a foreign transaction, with accompanying transaction and exchange fees.

Seems to me they should get the content they subscribed "to".

It was substantially better, but you really cannot expect me to remember details after 30 years! At the time, I was most struck by how many people would post results deriving from C-coded benchmark programs where the thing actually measured was different from what was purported to be measured, largely from ignorance.

Given how long these libraries have existed, I am surprised there are still opportunities for improvement such as that described in the TFA.

Back in the mid-80s I was involved in the design of a "mini Cray" supercomputer. We did not yet have any hardware to run on, but we did have a software simulator, and we wanted to publish some "whetstone" numbers. We got some numbers, were not too happy with them, and really dug in to analyze what we could do to improve them. The Whetstone code was in C, and used a fair number of library functions to both accomplish the numerical results and the preparation of the Whetstone answer. It turned out that most of the time was being spent in string copy and string compare functions from the library. We concentrated our efforts on redoing those library routines in assembly to take advantage of as many register-to-register operations and multiple-byte operations as we could. Although the Whetstone benchmark was supposed to measure numerical performance, our results showed that the numerical calculations took up little of the time.

Sadly, our "mini Cray" never saw the light of day. The mid-80s were a tough time to stand out in that arena as there were so many people trying to do the same thing.

It is quite common for Aussies to also be called "ozzies".

Ah, yes. But Clovis is not the Arctic North, is it?

I would have to disagree with that. My mileage did vary.

A couple of years ago I used Paypal to buy a product that was never shipped. The vendor ignored my complaint, and Paypal equally ignored my complaint. And I mean IGNORED.

Really, really not worth a read or a reply.

Not really worth the energy to reply.

The comment that started this chain did not mention humidity, so that is where the opprobrium should lie. Those of us who are aware that Atlanta has very high humidity understand that is the real issue.

I have not seen anyone yet comment on the obvious point that the video is a scripted advertisement for the Q50. I think the person leaving the driver's seat is not really deserving of the idiot or moron epithet. He is following the script.

Where is the outrage directed at Infiniti?

And what is the car supposed to do when it detects there is no one there while it is driving down the road? Especially one of the not-quite-self-driving vehicles shown in this video?

I just looked at the TFA. When I made my earlier comment, I did not realize the Ranger supercomputer was from University of Texas at Austin. UT Austin is, of course, where I spent my happy hours using 6600 serial 13, which was installed early on in my graduate school career. It was the main computer on campus during my stint as Asst. Prof. of CS, too.