Aye, and if you count the two trillion dollars we spent to protect oil fields, the subsidies are much higher than people realize for oil.

Imagine ... if we didn't do that. And oil went to $300 a barrel. We would have automatically gone to less expensive cars, solar would have surged into demand along with other alternative energies. We might have even worked on smaller, safer self contained- no human intervention nuclear power.

But since we engage in massive subsidies for sports stadiums, oil companies, banking companies-- I think the benefit (much lower cost solar panels) of subsidizing the early expensive iterations of solar panels will be a good bang for the buck. And reduce our need to spend two trillion dollars again in the future.

That's not what I've read from the FCC ruling that nixed that law. I must confess that I haven't read it all, but can you cite that which supports your point? What I've read from i.e. the amicus briefs to the FCC the law prohibited the electric company from servicing someone that didn't get their electricity from same company (or wasn't "in the area serviced"), not that they did any of the things you mention. (And in either case the FCC didn't like that law and struck it down).

OK, I'll bite. What would be a fair characterisation then? Or isn't there a problem to begin with? (Again the FCC in their 2015 broadband report seems to think there is.)

Since Google has patched the exploit in the main Android distribution, the announcement is to "encourage" OEMs who haven't yet pushed that fix to still-vulnerable devices.

It's not hard to understand why using passwords is so popular; basically all software supports it as an authentication method, it requires only hardware that you can safely assume that all your users have; and even an idiot understands it well enough to do it dangerously weakly but more or less correctly.

What is frustrating is how few even offer the ability to do anything else. There has been some uptake of shitty little cellphone-based systems(either using SMS or some 'authenticator app'); but RSA-type fobs are pretty much exclusively for accessing corporate systems(and, as a fundamental limitation of their design, they can only be securely used to authenticate against one entity; since, unlike asymmetric key systems, the authentication server must know the initialization seed values of the fob in order to validate authentication attempts, so anyone in a position to authenticate you could impersonate you anywhere else the same fob was accepted); and certificate-based auth is either something you do yourself for SSH(often without secure hardware for storing the certs) or something you basically have to do work for the DoD to encounter.

I'm actually currently in the process of trying to switch banks because, when I inquired about authentication options that weren't pitiful bullshit, they gave me what amounted to "that's adorable; add three or four factors of ten to your account with us and maybe I'll transfer you to somebody who gives a fuck." Blizzard cares more than that. FFS.

Which would be a valid reason to introduce a new international treaty on "Crimes against sentient AI" under which to prosecute those cruel enough to subject a poor AI to running on a Windows platform~

Things are so much better since we cut taxes for the wealthy.

The infrastructure is crumbling and college tuition which was free or nearly free now costs more than a luxury car at state universities.

We should have more of this dog eat dog stuff until we can share the glorious french experience of 1789 to 1799.

Parent was modded funny, but this is what your passwords should look like -- long and random, and typing them is a PITA. Any web site that disables pasting or prevents your browser or extensions from auto-filling passwords is broken. The sad thing is that most sites that do this (other than those that do it by accident because the devs are clueless) do it because they think they're increasing the security of their users' accounts. They're not.

Solutions like LastPass et al are the best, but honestly just using your browser's password database is better than reusing passwords everywhere. And Chrome and Firefox (at least, perhaps others) offer the option of keeping your passwords synced to all of the devices you use, optionally protected with a master password. Browsers need to offer password generation as well. I think some are working on it.

Of course, the real solution is to get rid of passwords. Web sites should switch to using OpenID authentication. Yes this means that most users will use their Facebook or Google logins, which means that, essentially, the site has outsourced its account security to those other entities. So what? If the developers of random web sites think they can do a better job of account security than Google or Facebook -- they're wrong . I work for Google and previously spent a decade as a security consultant in the financial industry and after seeing how they all work from the inside, I would feel much more secure about my bank account if I could use my Google account (with 2FA, plus all of the analytics and monitoring Google does) to log into it rather than trusting the bank to do a decent job with password-based security. I haven't seen Facebook's infrastructure, but I know people who work there, and they're good. Far better than you'll find at a typical bank, much less J. Random Web Developer.

Because they are BSD licensed, various Xiph codecs like Vorbis are popular for storing soundtracks of video games.

FLAC is a popular audio codec in high-end HD-based digital autio players aimed at audiophiles.

Google did provide Thoera variants at some point in time (I don't know if they still do).

Nobody ever lost money following suit due on thr gound of these codecs.

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The reason that Theora isn't that popular, is that currently H264 does provide a better image quality for a given bandwith and as most of the target audience already have a hardware chip supporting decoding (e.g.: in the tablet they use to watch Netflix) licensing doesn't matter much for them.

By asking for more money, H265 / HEVC is losing part of its attractiveness to H264. It compresses video better / gives more quality for the same compression. BUT costs more money.

On the long term all these are argument in favour of Daala : not only will it eventually produce even better compression (simply on the ground of being based on technology even more advanced), but is not covered by patents.

And this is why I'm glad that I'm here, instead of over there. What purpose does the municipality serve other than to serve its inhabitants? And what better way to serve them than with infrastructure, especially that kind which succumbs to a natural monopoly anyway? (Running many different fibre networks is as dumb as running many different electricity lines, or roads, to a house).

Now, if you want to preserve the market, then by all means, do what we do here, and stipulate that the municipality can't offer service on said network, instead having to open it to all and sundry who want to do so. That provides the customer with both potentially high speed internet, even in out of the way places. If you look at the places where e.g. the local electric company rolled out fibre and was stopped by legislation (Tennessee?), these markets weren't served by anybody else, and still isn't), and you have a market for service where companies can offer there services. Legislating against the electric company pulling the fibre is just counter productive; legislating that they would have to open their network, now that would be another thing.

But as that would lead to real competition, at a lower total cost, not crony capitalism, I don't have high hopes for you...

The frustrating thing is that we have better technology available; but we mostly can't use it because sites don't support it. PKCS#11 is older than God, and ICs to suit are nice and cheap because SIMs also use them; but when was the last time you saw a non-state site supporting that? The RSA style auth fobs are also better, as long as you don't let somebody steal the seed data(looking at you RSA) and they don't even need a card reader on the client device. Whatever the 'FIDO' people are messing around with is immature and barely adopted; but also is better than passwords. Aside from a few token "we'll send you a text message and call it two-factor" options, and amusing little pace-of-adoption quirks that make it easier to get a hardware token to protect your WoW account than your bank account, the sites that control the login options haven't done a damn thing in two decades.

Isn't that the only reason to care about this particular part? The laptop version is of interest because it has the distinction of being the fastest GPU(and probably pretty close to the fastest CPU) you can buy in any laptop too small/thin/etc. for a discrete GPU. The desktop version is just a solution looking for a problem unless the extra cache makes it better than other i7s.

But corporations are not people.

See my post, above, pointing out that corporations are groups of people, with all the rights guaranteed to people, who don't lose those rights just because they're acting together for a common purpose.

The legal system DOES, in some situations, treat corporations as pseudo-people. But that's just a convenient way to interact with the corporation's members/stockholders/what-have-you when they're acting together to advance the common purpose that the corporation was chartered to handle.

fuck off you right-wing scum.

In the immortal words of Red Skelton and Mel Blank: "He don't know me very well, do he?"

corporations aren't people.

Au contraire: Though they DO exhibit most of the characteristics of independent lifeforms, corporations are GROUPS of people, working together for a defined purpose. This is true whether they're businesses, schools, labor unions, churches, political parties, special-interest group, or whatever.

I assume we're agreed that people working together as a corporation shouldn't have any extra rights beyond the pooled rights of the individual members. But should these people LOSE any of their rights, just because they're working together?

Should spokesmen for a corporation with ten thousand stockholders, when speaking on issues related to the corporation's purpose, interaction with laws, and its stockholders' interests, have any less access to the ear of a legislator than the ten thousand stockholders themselves? A corporate lobbyist is just a representative of those ten thousand people when they're acting on this particular common interest.

The legal system treats corporations as pseudo-people because it's a convenient way to interact with the people making up the corporation when they're acting as a group.

It's also not comforting that these windows update drivers are breaking all over the place; because(at least for GPUs) the ones on windows update have historically been the relatively conservative option. They are frequently behind the curve compared to the direct-from-vendor ones; but are also supposed to be the ones that aren't breaking things just to improve some benchmark score.

What the hell are you talking about? Broadwell support under Linux is just fine and Phoronix just ran a piece showing Broadwell beating the crap out of anything else on the market when it comes to integrated graphics: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.p...

Hell, there's already SKYLAKE support that's publicly released!

As for binary blobs, since you give off the smell of an AMD fanboy, why do you hate Intel so much for copying your beloved AMD? I hate to break it to you, but the requirements for binary blobs in the OPEN SOURCE AMD drivers (not just Catalyst kids) has been around for years. Intel is probably putting these (small) binary blobs in because of third-party IP restrictions anyway.