The Burroughs part is a tagged memory architecture. There is no assembler, a variant of ALGOL is the system programming language. It's a hardware stack machine. Each memory word has tag bits that identify what kind of information is stored. Memory addressing is through segments, which do hardware bounds checking. Check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burroughs_large_systems for details.

The hardware and software were designed concurrently. This means that the system is very efficient and not very prone to software errors. Because of the hardware addressing mechanisms and the memory protection bits, this machine was immune to many of the security issues that plague modern CPU architectures. It is near to impossible to break security, because it is enforced by a combination of hardware and software. No current x86/Power/Sparc/??? will ever be as secure as this kind of machine. (The Mill CPU has some of the same characteristics, but lacks tagged memory bits in main memory.)

As a field, computing took a wrong turn when it went after MIPS as a measure of "goodness". Using hardware resources to enforce secure computing address the fundamental problem of writing reliable software. It protects against coding errors and against malicious attacks. Now that hardware is cheap, the additional cost of tag bits in memory or address range checking could be easily supported.

But we're stuck with fast insecure architectures and there seems to be no turning back. It wouldn't be surprising that current systems are in fact less efficient when you take into account the cost of trying to make insecure hardware secure along with the costs associated with software failures and stolen data, corrupted data bases, down time, debugging, etc. (By the way, Burroughs systems had great up times, which was also true of Symbolics Lisp systems, which also had memory tag bits and was programmed from the bottom up in a high level language.)

You're absolutely right. You should immediately stop whatever you are doing and develop that exact camera at a significantly lower price point then anything else out there using your vast knowledge of electronics and photography.

Or you could stop being an arm chair quarterback and STFU. Have you ever done anything vaguely like this? Have you ever done anything on your own initiative at all? Somehow I doubt it. You post here so you can pretend to be knowledgeable by denigrating people who are actually doing something.

Why don't you get your cheap shot ego fix somewhere else? You are the sludge that makes Slashdot a bore to read. Go away and leave us alone. We don't like you and we don't need you. Go away. Now.

As opposed to the tiny cute nuclear plants that you can get in all sorts of different colors and patterns.

You are now in a condition where you fall into one of two exclusive categories

1. You also make this complaint during the Bush administration. His use of executive power completely shredded the constitution. Just look at what Bush did with signing statements. And then there is the time that Chaney said the he was his own branch of government. Not in the executive, legislative or judicial. Did you make any comment about breaking the constitution at that time?

2. You are a de facto KKK member who hates the President because of the color of his skin

These are mutually exclusive choices. Somehow I can guess which one is more likely. So does it get stuffy on your nights out with the hood?

(By the way, I am extremely unhappy with Obama's action on constitutional rights. I was unhappy with Bush as well. As far as I can tell it's a race to the bottom, with Bush somewhat ahead. Obama might still come out ahead, he still has a couple of years to go.)

Stockman is one of the stranger Tea Party candidates who recently was elected to the House.

He walked out of the State of the Union Address saying "I could not bear to watch as he continued to cross the clearly-defined boundaries of the Constitutional separation of powers". Really adult.

He's running for Senate in Texas against Senator Corwyn, the Senate Minority Whip, and he just dropped off the map. He missed 17 House votes in a row. It also seems that even though he is a official candidate, he is doing zero campaigning. http://www.cbsnews.com/news/texas-senate-candidate-steve-stockman-goes-awol/

He has also been cited by the Office of Congressional Ethics (I know, I laughed too). He accepted campaign contributions from his own staff members, which is a big no no. He is also accused of using his full time House staff members to work on his Congressional campaign. They all pull this trick, but there is a legal way and a stupid way to do this. He chose stupid. http://oce.house.gov/2014/06/june-11-2014---oce-referral-regarding-rep-steve-stockman.html

So it's not surprising that he would be the one to further complicate the snake pit of uncontrolled domestic surveillance by injecting it into a congressional investigation. Considering his quote about Obama breaking the constitution, his appeal to use unconstitutionally collected data to get at the IRS is mind boggling. His brain is clearly an irony free zone.

Dell is a reseller. They do not invest in any of the fundamental technologies like CPUs or Operating Systems. They have no design expertise in virtual machines like the JVM. They don't do chip design or fab. They have never been in any of these businesses.

HP has a long history of OS and CPU design, including their own computers with a proprietary architecture. Not all of their designs were successful, since they were co-designers of the Itanium with Intel. So HP has the exactly opposite corporate background the Dell.

Why would anyone pay attention to what a Dell talking head has to say?

Given the genius level of legal reasoning in Peoria, I wonder if the defense will try and contact the judge by email and tell them that the city should be protected from financial liability because of taxes.

Since the cable scum have monopolies in their service areas, and they are clearly interstate businesses, there should be some other entity at the Federal level that can address this issue. I'm guess the FTC, but it not them, there should be someone else.

Oops, I forgot that we don't have any actual capitalism in the USA any more, because the regulators are all controlled by industry groups. Forget it. Your cable/phone/ISP bill is going to continue to go up far faster then inflation, and your service will suck even more. And there is nothing you can do about it.

Nothing to see here, move along. No capitalism, no competition, no democracy.

Snowden said he sent emails to the appropriate internal authorities before he went rogue, and the NSA said they couldn't find them. Everyone in the political establishment believed the NSA version. Now the IRS says that they can't find emails because of a technical problem, and no one believes them.

The NSA are professional liars. They've been caught lying about a huge number of things: spying on friendly foreign leaders, mass phone surveillance on everyone in the USA, modifying routers before they are shipped overseas, etc.

Double standard much? Who is more likely to be lying: the NSA or the IRS? Everyone in Washington are going after the IRS. Committees are meeting, IRA officials are testifying under oath, criminal investigations have been started. Higher ups at the IRA are going to be forced out, and there will be criminal charges. The same thing is also going to occur with the Veteran's Administration scandal.

Meanwhile over at the NSA, the sound of crickets. They claim that their own secret investigations have found they did everything right. Somehow this seems good enough. No one has been called to task. Even the people responsible for letting Snowden get access to all that information seem to be off the hook.

As bad as the IRS and VA situations are, they pale in comparison to the NSA situation and yet nothing has happened as a result. It's business as usual. The NSA is completely unaccountable to anybody for anything, and when they do screw up nothing happens to any insiders. This is guaranteed to result in a culture of incompetence. We are in big trouble.

I agree 100%. How can there be global warming when the world flat, not spherical?

When I'm near the computer I hear these voices that no one else can hear.

It tells me things that no one else knows. Things that I'm not supposed to hear.

Sometime it tells me to do things. It told me not to tell you what they are.

Computers only talk to very special people. You wouldn't understand.

It told me to shut up now. Bye.

A single addressing space that eliminates the distinction between memory and bulk storage (disk). Where have we seen this before?

Multics implemented a single level store for data access, discarding the clear distinction between files (called segments in Multics) and process memory. The memory of a process consisted solely of segments which were mapped into its address space. To read or write to them, the process simply used normal CPU instructions, and the operating system took care of making sure that all the modifications were saved to disk. In POSIX terminology, it was as if every file was mmap()ed; however, in Multics there was no concept of process memory, separate from the memory used to hold mapped-in files, as Unix has. All memory in the system was part of some segment, which appeared in the file system; this included the temporary scratch memory of the process, its kernel stack, etc.

http://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/eu-set-to-probe-irelands-tax-arrangements-with-apple

Ireland's taxation laws allow multinationals to set up subsidiaries that effectively turn them into stateless entities whose revenues are subject to no jurisdiction. It's the definition of entirely legal tax avoidance, and Apple has been among the most successful companies in routing much of its international revenues and earnings through its Irish subsidiaries.

Apple has conspired with the Irish government to move it's profit outside the space/time continuum. How else can you explain "revenues are subject to no jurisdiction?" That means the money has no legal presence anywhere on the planet. Or off the planet, as far as we know.

There are lots of locations where the rule of law doesn't apply. There are places where many different legal systems claim to be in charge. There are places like Antarctica where the international community has set up treaties so that one one country has control. Apple has been able to secrete it's money so it is not in any of these places.

They have outflanked the rule of law. They are in a literal sense "lawless": without law. Yet they make extensive use of the legal system and expect to have their business protected by civil and criminal authorities. It's corporate hypocrisy at it's most blatant.

Why are they getting away with this? I have a counter suggestion: round up all current and former living board members, everyone who was a Chief Executive Anything, put them in indefinite detention and strip them of every asset they have. Why do the deserve legal protection when they have made it their business to be above the law?

Stop masturbating in public. Your "argument" that more guns results in lower crime is a right wing fantasy.

How can I say this? None of your assertions have any factual support.

When you say "the most dangerous cities to live in today, are precisely those cities with the strictest gun control" you are making things up.

How can I make this assertion? N.R.A. Stymies Firearms Research, Scientists Say

The amount of money available today for studying the impact of firearms is a fraction of what it was in the mid-1990s, and the number of scientists toiling in the field has dwindled to just a handful as a result, researchers say.

The dearth of money can be traced in large measure to a clash between public health scientists and the N.R.A. in the mid-1990s. At the time, Dr. Rosenberg and others at the C.D.C. were becoming increasingly assertive about the importance of studying gun-related injuries and deaths as a public health phenomenon, financing studies that found, for example, having a gun in the house, rather than conferring protection, significantly increased the risk of homicide by a family member or intimate acquaintance.

Alarmed, the N.R.A. and its allies on Capitol Hill fought back. The injury center was guilty of “putting out papers that were really political opinion masquerading as medical science,” said Mr. Cox, who also worked on this issue for the N.R.A. more than a decade ago.

Initially, pro-gun lawmakers sought to eliminate the injury center completely, arguing that its work was “redundant” and reflected a political agenda. When that failed, they turned to the appropriations process. In 1996, Representative Jay Dickey, Republican of Arkansas, succeeded in pushing through an amendment that stripped $2.6 million from the disease control centers’ budget, the very amount it had spent on firearms-related research the year before.

“It’s really simple with me,” Mr. Dickey, 71 and now retired, said in a telephone interview. “We have the right to bear arms because of the threat of government taking over the freedoms that we have.”

The Senate later restored the money but designated it for research on traumatic brain injury. Language was also inserted into the centers’ appropriations bill that remains in place today: “None of the funds made available for injury prevention and control at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention may be used to advocate or promote gun control.”

The prohibition is striking, firearms researchers say, because there are already regulations that bar the use of C.D.C. money for lobbying for or against legislation. No other field of inquiry is singled out in this way.

In the end, researchers said, even though it is murky what exactly is allowed under this provision and what is not, the upshot is clear inside the centers: the agency should tread in this area only at its own peril.

“They had a near-death experience,” said Dr. Arthur Kellermann, whose study on the risks versus the benefits of having guns in the home became a focal point of attack by the N.R.A.

In the years since, the C.D.C. has been exceedingly wary of financing research focused on firearms. In its annual requests for proposals, for example, firearms research has been notably absent. Gail Hayes, spokeswoman for the centers, confirmed that since 1996, while the agency has issued requests for proposals that include the study of violence, which may include gun violence, it had not sent out any specifically on firearms.

So over here in the real world there are no facts about gun violence because the N.R.A. and their toadies in the Republican establishment hate facts. It's just like denying climate science on global warming: facts are the enemy.

Instead of engaging in rational debate and making knowledge based policy decisions, the right wing operates by spewing out wildly hostile propaganda and subverting decision making by coercion and bribery (AKA unlimited untraceable campaign contributions).

The result of all this is that fools like you can mask your twisted power fantasies about guns as an acceptable opinion in the public discourse because you live in a fact free bubble.