Then where do you draw the line? You clearly need a line, but that means you have to define it, and you need reasoning behind that definition.

I mean think: If we say that you are never on the hook so long as you were given an order by a supervisor, well then that means if they order you to kill someone, you are off the hook for that. Now clearly that is ludicrous. Everyone would say "Of course not in THAT case, they should know that is wrong!" Ok fine, so that means we need a line... Where's the line?

A pretty easy and clear line is illegality. You may not do something illegal just because someone ordered you to. In fact, that is where the military draws the line with their official oath. They pledge "hat I will obey the orders of the President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me, according to regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice." So if an order is NOT according to the UCMJ, then they are actually not supposed to obey it (I'm not saying there are never situations where this becomes a conflict in real life). So one can argue a similar idea for civilians, particularly since unlike the military you are not bound by law to obey supervisors.

Regardless, if you want the line to be something other than illegality, you need to define what that line is, and you need justification for why.

Specs look in line with other phones to me. The Note 3, which ran me like $700 (no contract), is 2.3Ghz quad core and an Adreno 330. So this seems pretty similar.

Only thing I see is the screen rez, but that really isn't that big a deal. The ultra high rez for phones thing is a little silly. Once you get around 300PPI or so, which this is, there really isn't any visual detail to be gained. Pixels are too small to be perceptible. So it is spec wanking to go higher and higher on small displays.

Criticizing the lock-in is very valid, but the price and specs seem in line with the other stuff out there.

Some are great like that. Foxconn is one. They will build to your spec. You spec the cheapest shit with every corner cut? No problem they'll do that. You spec the highest of the high end? They are all over that too.

Not the case with all vendors though. Some will cut corners, sub parts, ignore QC and so on to make extra money and/or offer a lower bid.

It can be a crapshoot.

Getting US made honey isn't hard. My preferred honey is Crockettâ(TM)s Desert Honey. It comes from the southwestern US (and Mexico, bees don't much care about borders). Very tasty, much nicer than clover honey.

The other Microsoft story, on the exact same page as Bill Gates telling you not to pursue money at all costs, and instead focus on making the world a better place?

Chinese Gov't Reveals Microsoft's Secret List of Android-Killer Patents

Right. We acquired all these patents to crush competition and make the phone market a monoculture. To make the world a better place.

Do so now.

The Firaxis reboot was good, but with the EW expansion it is amazing, probably the best turn based tactical game of all time. They hit the right balance of simplicity of mechanics and complexity of strategy, kept everything nice and balanced, gave you a lot of different valid strategy options and so on.

I've been extremely pleased with it and spent a shit ton of time playing it.

You can actually make realistic predictions, see the results, etc, etc. Doesn't mean it accomplishes much, but it is more grounded in fact and reality than this kind of crap.

We know -nothing- that we need to know to determine if there is other intelligent life in our galaxy, if so where, how advanced, etc, etc. We have no idea and there's no way at this time for us to have any idea.

So it is nothing but babble when people start speculating as to what might be going on. It is in every way as vapid any any talk about celebrity gossip and even less relevant and founded in reality.

If we ever start to have some of the information we need, then it might be useful, however right now we just have no damn idea.

We are kinda in the middle of the sticks in our galaxy. We are a good bit out in one of the arms. So even presuming there is other intelligent life in the galaxy (which of course we have no way of calculating the probability of) it could very well be quite far away. If they haven't figured out a method of FTL travel, or if indeed FTL travel is simply impossible, then it is the kind of thing where contact might ever happen.

Never mind the silly idea that there MUST be other intelligent life out there and that it MUST be way more advanced than us (neither of which have any evidence for or against) but it could easily just be way too far away for the laws of physics to make any kind of contact a reality.

The thing is, what I see it do, working at a university, is protect old professors from having to do any work. We have professors who teach one class, or even none at all, do not have a research lab, and are barely around on campus. Yet they are not fired, because revoking tenure is a near impossible process. So they get to collect their paycheck and do next to nothing.

It doesn't seem to help with regards to unpopular research because you have to do a bunch of research to begin with to get tenure. Who decides if you get it? Your peers, of course. So if you show up and do unpopular research, well then you aren't going to get tenure. It is a very real popularity contest.

The only way it would help is if someone came in, didn't say what they really wanted to research, did popular research for 6-8 years, got tenure, finished up that research to satisfy the grants they had gotten, then started on their unpopular research. That requires an awful lot of planning and subterfuge. Hence you basically never see it.

It really seems mostly to function to protect a good old boys club and make sure that if professors want to be completely useless during their twilight years, but not retire so they can still collect more money and get to play big shot on the university's dime, they can do so with no real fear of retaliation.

Download this.

I have heard a rumor that there may be comics available on Bittorrent in this format.

Because it costs a non-trivial amount of real resources to "produce". Dollars cost little and less to make and move. Even physical dollars don't take that much, and most dollars are just accounting entries in computers. So there isn't much resources spent on shuffling them around, no more than any of the myriads of other data we shuffle around.

However bitcoins require energy, lots of it and an ever increasing amount, to "mine". So creating them, and moving them around needs energy to be spent playing math games with no benefit. However it still needs real resources to generate the power to do it. It is an extremely wasteful idea, particularly if it were ever scaled up to the massive worldwide economic scale the BTC proponents want (it can't scale that high for a lot of reasons, but then logic isn't their strong suit).

The amount of power supercomptuers take is IMMENSE. Like let's say he was using Stampede, the supercomputer at University of Texas. That thing draws 3 MEGAWATTS when fully spooled up. That is just what it draws, not what its cooling system takes, which could easily be another half a megawatt. Now we dunno what they pay for electricity precisely, but looking at industrial rates in Texas with the PUC it runs somewhere around the realm of $73/MWh. So running this thing for just one hour spun up costs $250ish. Just the raw power cost is a lot.

Now I'll grant you, it uses some of that at idle. However even if all the systems just drop to idle power, and it doesn't shut down unused nodes, it'll still easily be 10% of that based on what our Dell servers use (the system uses a bunch of Dell servers with Sandy Bridge Xeons in them).

So never mind CPU time costs, maintenance, wear, other research getting delayed, etc, which is all very real, pure power usage is a lot for a big supercomputer.

Power costs is something many coin miners never seem to factor in. They'll crow on about their "profits" but if they deduct anything, it is just hardware costs. They don't seem to bother to analyze how much power their computers are using to do the mining, and then further how much power is being used to cool those computers, if applicable.

The claim made was reinfection via audio. However, as I said, I've seen no proof. Nor, for that matter, any proof on the audio exfiltration malware. Just the one sensationalist preliminary article and no followup.

Hence why I'm interested if there is actually any more information, or if this is just more Internet echo chamber where one unfounded report becomes an Absolute Truth(tm).

Is there any evidence of this "air gap malware" crap? Yes I remember there was a preliminary story on Slashdot... I don't remember any followup, any proof, just some wild ass speculation.

Is there any evidence that such a thing actually exists?

"That because he released non-ilegal things that Snowden was not a whistle blower? And therefore he should be prosecuted?"

Well ya, that could certainly be argued. When you get a security clearance it is made very clear to you that it is illegal for you to release classified information, under penalty of law. You sign plenty of documents to that effect and so on. So if you do, you should be prosecuted because you broke the law.

Now, the twist in that comes from if you revealed the government was involved in something it shouldn't be. That is what it means to be a "whisteblower" you are "blowing the whistle" on an illegal activity (as a referee blows their whistle on an illegal play in sports). Most people would say in that case you deserve protection from prosecution, because while you agreed to keep information a secret, that is different than keeping information of a crime secret.

Hence why someone can argue that the leaks of information about foreign spying aren't whistleblowing. I mean that is why America has the NSA, CIA, NRO, and so on: To spy on other nations. That is their express purpose and if they aren't doing that, there is little reason to keep them around. So revealing classified details about that isn't whistleblowing, at least not by a normal definition of the term.

Also trying to argue semantics about the journalists releasing information is silly. After all, Snowden is the one who originally got his hands on it, and chose what to give to the journalists. He maintains some responsibility for what they choose to release. If there was things he didn't want out, he shouldn't have given that information over. You can't hand information over to someone, with the intent of them releasing it, and then later say "Well but I didn't want them to release THAT!"

So the grandparent is being quite logical. I'm not saying you have to agree with them, but the point they make is valid.