And that fails to actually fulfill the requirements because reality doesn't conform to their model, rather than the other way around.

Would that be "fuck all" as in "buy something else", "don't buy at all" or "insist on the old version"? Tanking sales tend to have a very correcting effect on for-profit companies, assuming there's competition to speak of. Sure, I can't decide what that company will do but I can't decide what that OSS project will do either and while I can theoretically fork and maintain my own version it's not really a practical possibility 99.9% of the time. If there happens to be enough people dissatisfied with the direction it's taking to make a fork that's fortunate for me but really outside my control too.

I've been watching Gnome/KDE trying to battle Windows now for the last 15 years or so and making so little progress YotLD has become the running joke around here ever since Duke Nuke'm Forever shipped. Then I look at Android which is more cathedral than bazaar and it's gone from nothing to 85% world wide market share in 6 years. And the absolutely greatest success the Linux kernel is run like anything but a bazaar, lieutenants are from military hierarchy and it has one general on top - or benevolent dictator for life if that sounds better. Sometimes picking one direction - even if it's not the absolutely best one - beats taking no direction or pulling in ten different directions. Heresy, I know.

Sure he can. He just assumes that the West will never call him on it, or that if they do it'll be a very, very clear line like the Cuban missile crisis or when Hitler invaded Poland. He could probably nuke Kiev and occupy Ukraine and I still don't think NATO would come out and declare war on their own against the second biggest nuclear force on the planet. Don't forget that it's only a defense alliance, you can't invoke it unless a member state is under attack so there'd have to be a long and ugly political process.

Besides, even though Russia is significantly weakened compared to the Cold War when they had the Soviet Union and the East Bloc I'm fairly sure China would not like a US-led invasion party occupying Russia. If they use "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" logic they might throw their support behind Russia and then we'd all be in very deep shit. Just like WWI spiraled out of control there's really no telling how WWIII might turn out, you can't reliably estimate the cost. And people rarely mean "must be stopped at all costs".

Godwin be damned, this comparison is relevant. I think Crimea is Hitler's Sudetenland. Ukraine would be Hitler's Czechoslovakia. If he's stupid enough to touch a NATO country, that will be his Poland and ultimately his demise. Does he know when to back down? Khrushchev did, though he cut it close. Putin might too, at least the world might hope so. But we won't really know until we really draw the line and say so far, but no further. And I have the impression Ukraine is going to get fucked over before we draw that line.

If you're being shot at by a nutcase, you call the cops. If you're being shot at by an invading army, you call the military. If you're being hacked by script kiddies, you call the cops. If you're being hacked by a foreign government, you call the military. If Iran had the military muscle I would say an attack like Stuxnet is "casus belli" for declaring war. This is NATO expanding its defence treaty to include cyber attacks, launching such attacks against one member nation is like attacking all of them. And I think all nations have some form of private-government cooperation to secure critical infrastructure, whether that's physical or digital I don't see makes the big difference. You might argue it shouldn't be hooked up to the Internet, but totally isolated networks are extremely inconvenient.

Practically, all you need to do is install a non-crippled copy of ffmpeg or x264 because if you can transcode a video - that is, decode and encode it again - you can edit a video. Whether using those codecs without a patent license is legal depends on your jurisdiction, but the editing software doesn't have to deal with that as it could just use the system codecs. By default you would have Theora and H.264 would either come with your distro or be one command away. Mozilla could have done that, but they refused because they wanted HTML5 video to work out of the box, everywhere. That's not possible, but that's no excuse for why there aren't any good free video editors.

Why not? Games can actually render 4K detail, unlike the real problem with 4K TVs, there's almost zero native content. I did manage to play a bit at full 2160p and it was beautiful but also totally choking my GTX 670 so I'm currently waiting for a next-gen flagship model (GTX 880/390X probably) for a SLI/CF setup. CPU/RAM don't seem to be holding it back much though, but maybe at 4K so upgrading those too.

Nothing suggests he was reckless, but I'd say there's a pretty good case for criminal negligence which can also lead to a manslaughter charge. Unlike recklessness, negligence is a passive failure like not yielding, halting for a red light or in this case, failing to keep your car in your lane. They're duties you take on when you get a driver's license and operate a motor vehicle, just like a doctor can be sued for malpractice for missing obvious clues about what's wrong with you. You can't just run people over and say "Whoops sorry, it was an accident" and get away with it.

Nobody else would get away with breaking the law because they were following orders. You try telling that story in court when you run somebody over because your boss wants every email replied to within five minutes and they'll put you behind bars in an instant. If you want to make this sting upwards in the system, do that. But don't pretend he shouldn't be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.

Yes but X99 and DDR4 blows any chance of doing Haswell-E on a budget. I need a new PC and is considering either 4790K or 5960X, the former is fine now while the latter is going all out on new tech which I hope will last longer. Eight cores crushes the mainstream chip in multithreading. Eight RAM slots in case I want to double up, of a type that will exist long and improve much. Plenty PCIe lanes. Slightly weak single threaded performance at stock but considerable overclocking potential. With 10% performance improvement per generation it'll take ages until I need an upgrade again. On the other hand, a 4790K might last me long too.

Vote me down, I can't do math... 600 MHz-900 MHz/6 MHz bands is 100-150 channels, not 1000-1500 so 4-6 Gbit total for the loop...

No. At least not one that makes sense for storing one or two copies of a consumer hard drive. And you're stuck with a huge investment in one generation of tapes, unlike HDDs where you can gradually buy bigger and better drives. I'd rather see hard drives get cheaper and tape not than nothing getting cheaper at all. What's the real practical downsides to HDDs for the average person anyway? They're standard and can be hooked up to any computer (real fun if your tape drive dies on you or is lost/stolen). They're random access. Without a tape robot it's not more convenient. Without a environmental controlled tape vault I wouldn't trust their longevity claims.

Personally I think the ideal consumer backup solution is three hard drives, one offline next to your computer and one online hooked up via high speed Internet. Anything that nukes your files can't get to your offline copy even if the online copy is hacked or accidentally sync'd, anything that destroys all local copies like theft or a fire can't get to your online copy. One drive goes bad and you should still have two good copies though RAID1 on your main computer would be nice, just to avoid the downtime.

And for what it's worth, most consumer data isn't really worth backing up as they're just a cache to the Internet. I just checked and my total personal stuff (photos, videos, documents, source code, whatever) is 370GB, while I got 10TB+ of other things. And a lot of that which goes under personal is actually "backed up" in that friends or family got copies too, so strictly speaking I could do with even less. I actually see they have 512GB thumb drives now (at insane prices), actually my whole backup could fit in that now.

Well, from the looks of it a coax cable can carry anywhere from 1000-1500 6MHz channels @ 42.88 Mbit/s so 42-63 Gbit/s, subtract TV channels (200 @ 10 Mbit? = 2 Gbit/s), divide by number of subscribers sharing the rest. It shouldn't take that much money to cut a loop in half though, just pick a midpoint and run two coax cables straight to the central office. Considering how rapidly things progress with competition I really doubt there's any technical difficulty in delivering more.

Works for the US military, with more tanks you can acquire more oil...

May the computer totally fail to realize that the bridge is about to give out or the building about to collapse or an avalanche about to hit or a dam about to burst or you're driving right into a rioting mob or some other disastrous event? Even if I assume that the car will never, ever throw the controls to me and expect me to take over doesn't exclude the possibility that I want to take immediate physical control to avoid some kind of danger that goes above and beyond a computer's understanding of traffic rules.

Like Windows, OS X, iOS, Android and.... who exactly has a network transparent protocol? The X protocol was designed when X was essentially drawing boxes and text to a frame buffer. Today the GPU is by far the second most powerful - and in some ways, the most powerful computing device in a computer. The absolutely biggest, fastest link is between your CPU and GPU with a 16x PCIe 3.0 link (15.75 GB/s) and companies are working hard to create heterogeneous computing where they even access the same memory pool so you don't even have the bus overhead. Putting a network in the middle is like replacing a mainline water pipe with a plastic straw.

The lie is that you can do network transparency without compromise. Just because the protocol is transparent it's still a straw and applications don't know they only get a sip and not a fire hose of bandwidth. Those who assume they will fail miserably and are practically unusable over a network since there's no way for the protocol to scale down the traffic. If you've got a fast network, do RDP/VNC. If you have a bit of bandwidth, do a web interface. If you have very little bandwdth, do text mode SSH. X forwarding? If I absolutely need to have an X app running (no command line, no web interface) and I'm bandwidth constraint, but it's the least bad solution to a bad situation in the first place.