Of course it's more akin to stealing something rather than just trespass,

It's nothing like stealing something. It's like walking into an art gallery which is open to the public and making a perfect replica of an exhibit for yourself. (If there were DRM, it would be a locked gallery instead of an open one.)

Before there was one piece, and now there are two. The gallery is still in possession of its exhibit, so this is nothing like stealing an exhibit from them. It's more akin to creating new exhibits.

Terminator was far too optimistic in portraying our future as the War Against the Machines, a nice and clean them-versus-us scenario in which the machines would be non-human. The enemy would be easy to identify.

The reality is likely to be rather more ugly and messy. It'll be a War Against the Corporations, and unfortunately they are us. It will be man against man, those who care about their fellow humans versus those who perceive their only duty is to be a cog in their corporate machine, and society be damned.

It's all a bit bleak, and every day seems to carry us closer to that nightmare instead of towards a post-scarcity civilized future.

Thank you Amazon. Not.

It's a nonsensical argument to suggest that a company that introduces a service requiring heavy bandwidth is making all Internet users subsidize it by pushing their ISPs into upgrading their pipes. Pressure on bandwidth is not a negative thing.

The need for more bandwidth is one of the primary reasons why ISPs improve their offering over time. If it weren't for pressure on bandwidth they would mostly just sit back and let the money roll in without ever upgrading. Performing poorly on popular Internet services makes customers switch providers, and ISPs want to avoid that so they upgrade their links to provide a better service. That's how it works.

Netflix is merely pushing the bandwidth envelope, and that's good for all of us.

PS. I am not a Netflix subscriber, so no conflict of interest here.

Sounds more like an acknowledgment that, 'Yes, we KNEW we were hosting pirated binaries before, but now we're much more clever at it".

They know full well that this is just a fight between vested interests, with no a priori right or wrong (if you see an inherent right or wrong it's because you've already picked a side).

What we're witnessing here is the next skirmish in the copyright wars: "You play the piracy card, we play the common carrier card".

Converting to free and open source everything, whatever you opinion of it, does have casualties.

That's dangerously close to being a "Think of the publishers!" argument. It's not convincing.

If you want to keep people employed then give them something of positive value to do, not the negative value of restricting access to academic research.

That's a very good point made by the parent, and it has plenty of precedent outside of the Valve/Steam games space. I appear in the statistics as a "Windows User" for Guild Wars 2 (and for many years previously for Guild Wars 1), yet there hasn't been a Windows box at home for years and years. This is sure to be happening for Steam "Windows" games as well.

Wine works perfectly for gaming these days. Beware the "Windows User" statistics!

One area in which Intel is significantly more open than any manufacturer in the ARM ecosystem is in graphics hardware. Although Intel hasn't opened all their GPUs fully yet (from what I've read), this seems to be mostly because providing all the documentation takes time, not because they are against making everything open.

This contrasts dramatically with every single ARM license in existence. ARM's own MALI GPU is tightly closed (probably because MALI was a licensed technology) so the Lima team is having to reverse engineer a Linux driver. All the ARM licensees who provide GPUs seem to be either unable to open their GPU information because their GPU core has been licensed from a 3rd party, or else are simply disinterested in doing so, or else vehemently opposed to it for alleged commercial reasons in at least a couple of cases. So, the prospect of open documentation on SoC GPUs appearing from ARM manufacturers is vanishingly small.

This gives Intel at least one possible opening through which they can be fairly certain that the competition will not follow. Although that may be worth a lot to us in this community, the commercial payback from community support tends to be very slow in coming. Still, it's something that Intel might consider an advantage worth seizing in the mobile race where they're a rank outsider.

Samsung is a supplier of really top quality electronic components in the industry, and at the same time offers those components at extremely competitive prices. That made Apple the primary beneficiary of their contractual relationship, because you can be dead certain that Apple didn't let Samsung charge a premium just because their components were going into high margin Apple products. Samsung doesn't have to beg people to buy their components, they sell themselves on price. Samsung PoP memory even went into the extremely cost-sensitive Raspberry Pi, which really underlines Samsung's approach to pricing.

Once Apple replaces Samsung after their myopic patent war, the replacement partner is very unlikely to match Samsung on quality and price together, so if Apple wants high quality they're going to have to pay more and pass that cost on to their customers.

There is only one loser in all of this, Apple users, because it's unlikely that Apple will reduce their margins. And Samsung is almost certainly delighted that once Apple finds a replacement they can stop supplying a partner that chose to become an enemy, and in the interim to force a price hike.

Samsung is a semiconductor manufacturer (among many other things), and with that comes a whole slew of innovation in electronics. You should check out their leading edge work in camera sensors, not just for smartphones but also at the high end for very impressive cameras of all types that rival Nikon and Canon in some areas. They are very much a leading technology company.

And of course their ARM designs are among the best in the field as well, often detailed here. It's a reasonable guess that Intel is going to be under pressure from Samsung in the power-per-watt area in the not too distant future.

Comparing Samsung to Apple is kind of silly. The company is much more comparable to Sony (in their heyday), omnipresent in all fields of manufacturing. Like all huge engineering conglomerates, they innovate incrementally and continuously, and mostly silently without needing a media circus.

I think perhaps the point that he was making about designing with pointers wasn't fully appreciated by everyone, because he didn't really spell it out. It's not just a matter of preferred coding style nor clarity, far from it.

The unconditional pointer update approach is atomic by virtue of the update being performed in a single memory write cycle, whereas the longer conditional form is clearly not atomic, and to make it atomic would require using locks. (There's a bit more to it than that because you still have to worry about what is being assigned, but it does reduce the scope of the problem significantly.)

This distinction is extremely important in a highly concurrent application like an operating system kernel, because you can merrily use his preferred code everywhere without worrying whether it's going to be used concurrently or only called within a protected critical region. In contrast, if the conditional form were used concurrently then you would have a wonderful recipe for intermittent concurrency bugs, the kernel designer's very worst nightmare.

Is Curiosity rover male or female?

On report panels and interviews, the scientists and engineers on the Curiosity team refer to the rover as "she" and "her" .

Using the female gender seems to be traditional for ships, so perhaps that extends to spaceships, and by association, to space probes.

It takes time to hone courses and online teaching methodologies into effective systems of education, so it's no huge surprise if the quality is below standard at the moment.

That first AI course of Thrun and Norvig's was nothing short of a didactic disaster, full of unexplained inconsistencies in the material, very limited coverage of the area, and no effective authoritative means of answering queries and misunderstandings. The many online fora were just the blind leading the blind. In summary, it was not a Stanford quality course. Many people still benefited from it, but that's a testament to their own individual perseverance and not to the quality of the material nor the teaching.

It will take time to get it right, and I'm sure that that particular course has improved already. But even more importantly, it will require a lot of experience to flow under the bridge before MOOCs earn significant respect, much of that experience based on trial and error. This should be no surprise. Physically attended courses didn't become perfect overnight either.

Encryption of all your Internet comms has been recommended forever and a day, but the bulk of the population hasn't bothered so far because the "postman opening letters" hasn't been very overt and in the public eye.

Now that the politicians are all in the game of demanding their "right" to monitor everything, perhaps it's time that people will respond by finally encrypting everything and telling the police state advocates to sod off and stop terrorizing the population.

I wonder how Apple is going to spin the fact that every man and their dog was releasing a 7" tablet at the time that Jobs was vitriolic in his total contempt for that size. How times change.

Welcome to the party, Apple. You'll discover that it's an excellent form factor for tablets, very mobile for use on the go instead of merely transportable like larger ones, and it doesn't force you to squint like a smartphone display. Best all-rounder size, I reckon.

I love mine, it's proven repeatedly to have been the right choice and an excellent workhorse.

This man deserves a medal for ingenuity under extreme hardship.

One thing that added unnecessarily to his misery though was that the hospital recommended a prosthetic that he couldn't afford. It's not a huge stretch of the imagination for hospitals to run cheap RepRap-type 3D printers for such needs and print out basic parts on demand. Both the building and running costs are very low indeed.

Of course such parts would be very poor compared to professional prosthetics or even professional 3D printing, but when the choice is between that and nothing, it's hard to argue against it. And the flexibility of such printing means that it is easily adapted to evolve with individual requirements, and replacement of printed parts is almost cost-free when they break or wear out.

It seems a good fit for this kind of unfortunate situation, and it might have made this man's days more bearable as he worked on his own solution, or indeed contributed to it where plastic is more appropriate than steel.