And yet each year we set a new record on total emissions because there's a bigger population who wants a higher standard of living. Looking at Trends in global CO2 emissions 2013 report (pdf) on page 50 you can see that the emissions in industrialized nations are down around 20-25% per capita from 1990-2012 through greener technology but a lot of that is lost in population growth and the low hanging fruit is gone. For developing countries all the arrows point upwards, even if we assume China will level out at EU levels (almost there) and not US levels (about double) there's still India and another few billion people who'll also want the standard of modern living.

Currently the best guess is that world population will peak at a little over 9 billion people (this is mostly a fill-up of elderly, the number of children is not growing anymore) and if we assume the world average CO2 per capita will approach the EU average then we're still looking at a 25% increase from population growth and 50% from higher standard of living for a total of 1.25*1.5-1 = 87.5% above today's level. Unless there's a huge breakthrough in green energy it's almost inevitable that CO2 emissions will continue to increase massively, considering what's politically realistic. I don't suppose saying "stay poor, so you don't pollute like we do" will fly very far and genocide even less so.

Create a new BitCoin account, transfer some funds there and claim "I don't know whose account that is and I don't remember why I sent money there" and you've got a weak plausible deniability, I mean it's not like I have to keep track of my cash that way, just because I was given a $20 bill with serial number 1234567 from the bank it doesn't prove anything when it shows up in some drug dealer's roll of cash. Or for that matter, that a $20 bill once used to buy drugs is now in my hands. Money kept in secret must be used in secret though, if you pay with then openly it'll expose your shadow account and all the money paid from it as yours all along.

Terrorism is a hit and run business, if they're trying to cease and hold control over territory it's a civil war. Popular support is not a prerequisite, armed factions that clash in warlike combat while the general population suffers is more the norm rather than the exception. That one or both sides get external help too. Of course it doesn't exclude the possibility that those waging war also do terrorism, but taking control of buildings and raising flags isn't it.

Well if the idea was to start a fire he overdid it, what's left of Nokia - at least the mobile division Microsoft bought - is nothing but a smoldering, burned out husk. Despite burning all other sales to the ground Windows Phone still only has about 3% market share and meanwhile Android has covered 80%+ of the market by units and makes money by volume, Apple with their high ASP (average selling price) and margin still do good on revenue while Microsoft is even deeper in no man's land than before.

I doubt Microsoft wanted to buy Nokia, but at this point they were really in danger of losing their one and only remaining hardware partner so it was either that or flunk out of the phone market entirely. Which would pretty much kill the vision they're selling with Windows across the board on phones and tablet/laptop convertibles. That the market isn't buying it yet - and IMHO never - is one thing, but it's what the stock holders are buying into and if Microsoft had to wave the white flag the stock price would tank.

I don't think Microsoft will do well as a hardware company and I don't really understand where all the synergy is supposed to come from, true they have the XBone division but apart from die shrinks they offer a new model maybe twice a decade. If they don't stay on top of all the latest screen, CPU, GPU, broadband, wireless, GPS, camera, sensor, SoC technology and so on then outdated phones don't sell worth shit. And the software to support it is also all mobile specific, what's left to chop?

I find it very strange if I wouldn't have the same standing to sue anyone abusing my likeness in a US court for violation of US law in US jurisdiction as anyone else. For example, if you slander me in a US newspaper why shouldn't I have standing to sue you? If those laws didn't apply to literally everyone, any foreigner would be totally without the protection of the law in every country but their own and there's plenty crimes that can be conducted remotely.

They only capture the few collisions that look interesting for further analysis, I don't know exactly what that means but they probably got fingerprints for known, common collision results and discard them immediately. Like a coin flip where you dismiss heads and tails and only look for the WTF events like it landed on the edge, rolled off the table or was snatched in mid-air that doesn't fit any previous pattern.

Personally, I just applied the "Windows 7 Installation Disc" patch. It seemed to solve my problems and it lets people like you get back to drinking the kool-aid. I didn't need any criticism I made be turned into an attack on myself of why I haven't been arsed to report/debug/bisect/patch/test it. You even managed to throw in a little belittling and dismissal, all you lacked was a bit of snark about how you "got what you paid for". I tried Linux because so many people told me it was ready, not to be some unpaid QA/alpha tester for buggy crap. That's the kind of work you'd have to pay me to do, free is not worth it. Expect people to get angry when you pull a bait and switch on them, even if you didn't do the baiting. And even though all it costs me was time I actually value my time and despite those who waste it.

In libertarian world negative externalities are paid by those who are stuck with them, even if they're an unwilling third party to someone else's actions because nobody has any responsibility for the common good. If a river flows through your land to someone else's land where they sell drinking water, you can dump your sewage in the river and sell your own clean upstream water. If you're a drug pusher and a junkie wants drugs it's a voluntary transaction, that the junkie robs and steals to feed his crack habit is none of your concern. If you come across a man dying of thirst, you don't have to give him a drink of water even if you have plenty. In short, libertarianism doesn't require you to do anything for anyone else's well-being.

The counter-arguments typically are that charity and compassion will kick in and libertarians will give him a drink of water, but not because they're compelled to by law. People will form voluntary agreements and shared resources like a town well out of mutual benefit. In short, their solution to the "tragedy of the commons" is basically to pretend it won't happen even though history shows it quickly devolves into a few rulers/gangs/companies with power and many regular people at their mercy. If you get to play with every dirty trick in the book then competition will quickly cease and one monopolist or an oligarchy will control the market and smother any start-up in its infancy.

It takes less work to produce the same, but we keep on wanting more. If I compare 2014 to what life was like in 1964 or 1914 then it's obvious I have vastly more and to such a degree I'm completely oblivious about it. When my dad was in his teens they barely had money to put food on the table. Clothes and shoes were mended and patched until they fell apart and the toys, entertainment and vacation budget was a flat zero and very often he'd be working on the farm rather than goofing off. Not to mention they lacked a few minor things like running water and electricity, I guess you can figure out all the other commodities that were missing. I remember when calling long distance - like, outside our county - was expensive and talking to relatives in the US absurdly so. Usually we got and sent one Christmas card a year.

Today's poverty around here is mostly about embarrassment and being a social outcast. No iPhone. No PlayStation. No exotic vacations. No brand clothes. No wasting money on cafes and restaurants. No big parties or expensive birthday presents for classmates. No expensive social activities/hobbies/sports. No living in fancy places in the expensive parts of town. I get it, being the poor kid is absolutely no fun and probably an easy pick for bullies. But apart from keeping up with the Jones' they don't starve or freeze or lack education or healthcare or indeed most modern comforts. Maybe it's just me but despite they being "poor" I'd rather spend money on children who are really being denied basic rights rather than excessive equality ideals at home.

Oh, it wouldn't be nearly the most fucked up story from the old sagas either - Loki is a shape changer and the mother of an eight-legged horse for starters - but trying to use the old lore to justify this particular story line doesn't work.

Hitting 100Mbit/s peak? Well, today I bought Divinity: Original Sin on Steam and of course that was faster. And it's July, if I want to go to our cabin (no fixed line, barely 3G w/mobile cap) I need to download anything I'd like to bring with me for a rainy day. After a trip with some friends I sent him the videos we'd made (raw 1080p/60 from the camera) and that maxed my line.

Of course, I didn't need 100 Mbit for any of that but on the other hand what's the savings to the ISP if I up/download the same number of GB slower? Across many thousands of subscribers in my city it evens out anyway and they still have to maintain the fiber line and modems at each end so there's no last mile bottleneck, in fact they can switch speeds at will with a simple software update. I suppose with higher speeds I might become a bit more careless about bits and bytes but for the most part it's just convenience, not total throughput.

I think that's reflected in the pricing too, the lowest they offer here is 5/5. Next level: +400% bandwidth, +30% price. After that: +150% bandwidth, +23% price. Finally to reach 100/100: +100% bandwidth, +18% price. Unlike water, electricity or other utilities the higher speeds you got, the faster you're done and the line returns to idle and the premium is not even remotely close to the theoretical increase in bandwidth.

Over the next couple years they'll be rolling out gigabit Internet, do people need it? Of course not, but it's nice to have. I'll probably get it if the premium is not too high, with fiber it could become as standard as GigE on motherboards and all you really pay for is bulk bandwidth. I ran into that on my cell phone this month (vacation time), cap used up so I'm on slooow connection until next month rolls around or pay more this month for increased cap.

Thor is never female in that story, he's cross-dressing pretending to by Freyja in full bridal dress and veil using her clothes and jewelry with rocks for boobies to fool clueless giants. The entire setup is extremely humiliating for Thor and he's not at all identifying with or acting feminine and only Loki saves him through clever excuses. The only one to get a peek under the veil is Trym the giant king looking to get a kiss and quickly reconsiders. When Thor is handed the hammer during the wedding ceremony he goes on a slaughter killing Trym and all his kin for what he's had to endure. Nothing in the ancient tales suggests he's anything but a male and masculine god.

While that's all well and nice there's no Leonardo da Vinci degree where you get to play with everything from anatomy to airplanes, without a degree or other substantial domain knowledge you'll still start at the very bottom of the ladder and never rise much past it. If you want to work in law you need a law degree, in medicine a medical degree and even if the formal requirements aren't so high accumulating the experience to advance means a career is typically a 10+ years investment of your life. Nobody cares if you're good at "problem solving, understanding abstractions, and of course strong communication skills" when you have 10 years experience with whip and buggy but everyone has switched to cars. You have a bit more choice early on to bail and switch paths but it really sucks to find a dead end 20 years down that road and that choice is now.

Obviously it's not that easy to predict the future but you can certainly say something about what jobs are at risk of being automated away and which will expose you to direct competition to the lowest bidder worldwide. For example with autonomous cars on the horizons I'd not want to become a truck driver today, if you're 20 today maybe when you're 50 you realize all you have is 30 years on the road but now trucks drive themselves. And I don't mean you have to become a plumber or something like that, if you get hired by SpaceX I'm fairly sure you'll have a lifetime career in rocket science, if not necessarily at that company. Sure, all those skills you've mentioned are essential to climbing the career ladder, but it helps an awful lot to pick the right ladder first.

No matter why they were laid off they'll never say who's next in line if conditions don't improve, they need to keep that ambiguous to maintain order. Otherwise you'll have business units and/or employees that feel their heads are on the chopping block and seriously disgruntled, not just an ominous threat. Everybody needs to be made believe that if they work hard and pull the business around their job can be saved.

Perhaps if you thought the people fired were those who deserve to be fired and not the result of office politics, ass-kissing, nepotism, mindless cost-cutting (our workers are too expensive, cut the high end), short-sightedness (let's outsource to India) or whatever latest fad found in a trade magazine. Whenever management announces layoffs almost everybody worries and starts focusing on how they can preserve their own ass, regardless of the consequences for the team or company.

My pay check is not that influenced by dead weight, I hardly believe that once they're done weeding out the unworthy they'll be handing out raises for the rest of us. Winding up laid off on the other hand would have pretty big consequences for my personal economy, even if it's irrational or unfair or based on a flawed perception of reality. That they're very reluctant and slow at letting people go is not a purely negative trait when you're looking for a safe haven and steady paycheck, with a solid buffer until you're at risk.

Except that hothardware being tech geeks confuse cause and effect. The estimated cost of the 8GB of GDDR5 in the PS4 is ~$100, the hardware costs are almost the same and the "extra validation" mainly involves staying a little conservative with clock speeds and code optimizations. The real reason is market differentiation and if there is none you create one like with student and senior citizen discounts even though they all take up one seat. That lets you set entirely different prices based on the willingness to pay in workstation markets as opposed to gamer markets.

Of course to make it work, you must make sure that the workstation market won't use the gaming card so you make sure those features are absent or not working or not tested/validated/supported on the consumer cards. It's the same reason Intel won't give you ECC on a consumer motherboard/CPU like AMD does, it would be beneficial and cost next to nothing but it'd encourage penny-pinchers to use them as poor man's servers. It's all about steering customers to the "right" product, the rest is implementation details.