There are certain ways ACID compliance is important and certain ways it is not, in fact sometimes it's a hinderance. In particular the following:

One patient's records must be consistent only with itself, you don't need the whole patient table to be consistent. It's a problem because you do need to have cross-table consistency (patients, episodes, diagnosises, treatments, medications and so on) which can lead to locking issues while they're really millions of records living in parallel. Really I'd like to treat them as millions of microtables that happen to share the same structure but never cross lock.

Perhaps in a hospital you can do synchronization at a database level but for an exchange or common journal you have to assume records come in asynchroneously, your general physician might finish some paperwork while you're in emergency care at the same time as a lab result you've waited a week for comes in. The actual ordering they're applied in doesn't matter, there must be rules so (A,B,C), (C,A,B) and (B,C,A) all end up the same result. This means you can relax the hard synchronization of for example a bank account where it is essential that the transactions are applied in order and rejected if you're overdrawing your account, but that's hard in SQL.

That doesn't just apply to the ordering of writes but also querying. If two people at different hospitals tries to pull up your medical records it is important they're not corrupt but it's not essential that an update being distributed is presented to both or none. In fact, for essential robustness they should be able to continue working independently if the connection is broken and when the connection is restored the records are reconciled. That kind of shard and merge is generally a problem relational databases don't handle while the distributed synchronization is rather essential and implicit in NoSQL solutions.

There's still a >10:1 cost difference between 4TB HDDs and 1TB SSDs and SSD prices are not dropping that fast. Current SSDs are already on the bleeding edge of processing technology with 16nm MLC so there's fairly limited density increases and big durability issues ahead. I guess the wildcard is 3D NAND, but much like going multicore for CPUs it's a substitute. However, they are taking over all normal end user uses in cell phones and tables and laptops, it's just the big bulk storage left.

Unfortunately the whole market has leaped off the deep end on this one with "small" models bigger than the old flagships like for example the LG G2 Mini is 4.7", Sony Xperia Z3 Compact is 4.6" and the Samsung Galaxy S5 Mini and HTC One Mini 2 are both 4.5" - just as big as the new iPhone. I won't even comment on the 5" LG G3 Mini, as opposed to the full 5.5" version. In fact Apple is the only one who calls a <5" screen normal anymore. Obviously with a smaller screen and smaller phone you can't put the biggest, fastest and most features in it but I still find it disappointing that nobody takes the small sized phones seriously. I'm consider the Z3 Compact as it seems to be a decent compromise, but will wait until the reviews are out.

Good for you. Mine is all e-bank and I tend to like it that way. Same with most the e-tailers I shop at, the intersection with physical retailers is slim. How do you visit Gmail or Facebook? Speaking of which, people often have a different third party between them and whoever they're communicating with. You could always pretend it's not signed you know, what would you do? Send an email, asking them if that's their real certificate? Try to verify it through your "web of trust", which includes a bunch of dimwits who'll make the CAs look good? No, I wouldn't trust them for real end-to-end encryption but it's mostly good enough.

CAs takes the fradulent redirect threat down, but they could always just hack your computer and keylog everything, they could hack the bank, it could be an inside job, they could social engineer you into thinking this is a legitimate certificate update or they could social engineer the bank into thinking you've made a new certificate or whatever. It doesn't matter how many inches of steel the front door is if the rest is plywood and glass windows. Direct out of band secure exchange is of course technically the best, but also the most inconvenient. I guess you should also swap giant OTPs, wouldn't want to trust AES right?

Tax some (UK population) and give benefits to others (rest of the world) is not socialism, generally the rule is everybody pays and everybody gets. If the former doesn't hold, you can't expect the latter to hold either so I perfectly understand BBC Worldwide charging for their content.

Norway here, I just have to gloat a little, since our numbers just spiked (Norwegian) last quarter.

US population density: 32.43 pop./km^2
Norway population density: 15.6 pop./km^2
80,1% of households have fixed broadband
Mean speed: 23.1 Mbit/s
Median speed: 17.8 Mbit/s
No caps on fixed broadband

A few select areas already have gigabit, more are rolling out as new fiber nodes are ready while the old are mostly 100 Mbit/s. Actually one company has said they'll deliver 10 gigabit if anyone is willing to pay ($2300/month) but nobody's taken them up on that offer. If I won big in the lottery that'd be on my list though, lol.

6-7 years ago, that's like a Q6600 or so? Have you actually looked at benchmarks like Q6600 vs 4790K because current top of the line quad-cores are 3-4 times faster than that.

No, because of a couple things:
1) Single-threaded performance is still huge and often the bottleneck in interactive work - big multithreaded jobs just decide how long a coffee break you get.
2) Lots of cores means big die means big costs and poor yields meaning they aren't really interested in selling it at consumer prices.
3) Companies would no doubt try to use these as cheap servers or whatever and they don't want enterprise users buying anything but Xeon.
4) You can now get i7-5960x in an "enthusiast" system with 8 cores at least, though it'll cost you $1000. Or you can buy AMDs marketing and get an "8-core" FX processor...

I wish I could get around to ever documenting anything, usually I'm too busy making systems work in an accurate, succinct and understandable way. Technical writing can only unfuck so much of a convoluted mess and I definitively lack the patience and bullshit skills for public relations.

As I understand it Bukkit is a mod licensed under the GPL. The Minecraft server is proprietary. They don't share any code, so individually they're not derivates of anything. CraftBukkit combines the server code with the mod code. This is illegal both ways - the server license doesn't let you link to Bukkit, the Bukkit license doesn't let you link to the proprietary server. Mojang could have shut down CraftBukkit any time they wanted to. But so can any of the Bukkit developers, because it's not in compliance with the GPL either. In this case it looks like neither side has seen in their interest to shut this down - until now.

They're not using the DMCA against the server. They're not claiming they have any legal rights to the server. What they are doing is shutting down any mod or add-on that depends on illegal linking and saying the only way to make this legally compliant is if Minecraft decides to GPL their source code. If they don't all these derivates will remain illegal and the copyright will now be enforced. They're hoping that the Minecraft community has become so dependent on these illegal derivates that Mojave will cave and release the code. Yes, he is using the code for extortion by first writing the code knowing it would be used in violation of copyright and then using copyright law as leverage once it's popular. But this is all the legal kind, you can never be charged for threatening to enforce the law.

With all due respect, if you're seeing a huge difference then I very much suspect it'd due to the actual devices, settings and algorithms rather than the resolution. I have an 3840x2160 UHD monitor and I've taken very high resolution photos (18MP) with lots of fine patterns that makes changes in detail easy to spot and scaled it to 3840x2160 as well as 1920x1080 then made a dumb pixel doubling upscale to 3840x2160 to simulate a 1080p display and a high quality upscale to simulate an upscaling UHD display and stored all three as PNGs. That should eliminate pretty much every other source of differences since it's the same screen, same mode, same settings.

When I flip back and forth between them, sitting at a natural distance to a 28" monitor clearly there's some change in detail but it was actually a bit underwhelming compared to what I was expecting. And with a monitor you sit really, really close compared to a TV, if I doubled the distance to a 56" TV the viewing angle would be the same but that would be way, way closer than I actually sit and at couch-equivalent distances I can't tell the difference at all. I guess if I had a 100"+ TV or projector screen then 4K would make sense, so for cinemas and home cinemas I'm sure it's great but your average living room just won't benefit.

That sounds low, here's a test of the iPhone 5 and at maximum power draw they killed a 6000 mWh battery in two hours meaning a power draw of ~3W. Of course that includes the screen and the whole SoC, but if you can put a 5W processor in a tablet I'm thinking 1W in a smartphone seems reasonable. P.S. My Google-fu says that <10 mW is only if the CPU is in suspend/standby mode, basically it's off and waiting for the network or user input to wake it up again. Idle but active draw seems to be more like 30-50 mW which is the target Intel would need to reach. Not Core M territory though, they'll still make Atoms for that.

Well, these chips are primarily for tablets. Fanless tablets. Pretty much the exact opposite of where you'd like to do any serious computing. The CPU is these things mostly exists to support it as a presentation device. I think many people haven't realized how much Intel has moved into the GPU space though, simply because they still think of it as a CPU with integrated graphics. True, they're not competing in the high end discrete graphics cards but they're eating away at the dGPU chips that used to be in all laptops, now you just find them at the very high end. If they took their EUs, put them on a separate chip and multiplied it up to a 250W power budget I wonder how far up the totem pole they'd reach.

Well, if you look at their power distribution graphics it's now primarily screen, then CPU and then SoC. Even though Intel is improving the last two it seems that to take anything to the "next level" we need more power efficient screens.

It's okay, it's the 21st century and men are allowed to cry now. Wuzz.

Actually, it is the old debt default from 2001 causing them to default now. In two rounds in 2005 and 2010 some 92% of their creditors agreed to cut 65% of their debt through new bonds - over a barrel, of course. The last 8% want all of it with full interest, but they're not getting anywhere in Argentinian courts. However, now they've gotten a ruling in a US court that Argentine can't pay interest on the new bonds without also paying them in full. Which Argentine can't, because part of the agreement with the other 92% is that nobody else will get a better deal so it would invalidate everything. They could make a backroom deal to make somebody else buy out the last 8% and swap for new bonds, but that's basically paying these guys off and setting a very, very bad precedent for later debt negotiations.

Instead they decided to play hardball back and just default, meaning those 8% get nothing - and neither do the 92% who agreed to new bonds. It's basically a giant game of chicken, who backs down first - Argentine because they want to get back on the international financial markets or will the last 8% figure 35% today is better than dreaming of getting their 100% + interest back forever. Argentine actually manages their finances quite well at the moment, being cut off from international credit means they've had to bring their budgets in balance and from the looks of it they can stay defaulted for quite some time.