I wouldn't go that far, but there's OSHA safety and Secret Service safety. Most companies have policies that exist primarily to make it hard to make accidental, ignorant or reckless breaches of security. The level of security needed to effectively protect against a malicious insider planning to do mischief is so high that most places it's not worth it, it doesn't mean the low hanging security measures are worthless. Having a bullet proof vest isn't stupid even though someone could shoot you with a bazooka. As long as you're not making a steel reinforced door and leave the window open...

If you're a standard Ubuntu user you probably won't notice much, because it's the developers getting gray hairs from X. They work around all the shitty problems so it works for you, just like users felt IE6 worked fine.

The main issue is how rendering is done on modern applications/desktops:
1. The client draws everything into a bitmap using its own tools
2. The client passes it via X to the compositor, which puts it together
3. The compositor passes it via X to the hardware, which draws it

So X does not do a whole lot anymore, and what it does it does poorly. Lots of blocking calls, poor versioning (per client, not per bind), poor synchronization (tearing), hardware overlays don't mix well with regular compositing, support for multiple monitors and input devices with hotplugging, global hotkeys/media keys, conflicts like modal window and screensaver both wanting to be on top and so on.

So what is it X did, that Wayland doesn't do anymore:
1. Help you draw the application (use Qt/Gtk/vwWidgets/OpenGL instead)
2. Draw the application somewhere else, assuming it wasn't just passed as a complete bitmap. In that case remote X and Wayland over RDP will perform similarly.

And though it's not directly part of the protocol, you're likely to see a revisit of client vs server-side decorations since Weston - the reference implementation - only support CSD. Basically, who draws the borders, title and buttons of the window. Mobile applications make this more interesting since you often don't want to dedicate the screen space, but you still want to be able to move/minimize/close/kill frozen applications through hot corners and such. But primarily it's a technology migration.

The EPA does two things, both of which sound good but are extremely hard to put a dollar value on so saying it's financially sound sounds very categorical. The first is protecting the macro-environment from pollution like NOX (acid rain), CFCs (ozone layer depletion), DDT (cancer) and various other toxins. Potentially huge impacts, but also vastly complicated models riddled with uncertainty in both effects and consequence. Like for example CO2 emissions and AGW, could you put a dollar value per ton? I mean if you could with any certainty there wouldn't really be any controversy.

The other is protecting micro-environments, basically small and isolated habitats where rare and endangered species live. Neat, but also means they're rather insignificant to the ecosystem as a whole. Biodiversity might have some unquantifiable benefits for biologists, medicine and such, large animals occasionally brings tourists but in many cases I doubt you'll find any immediate financial effects of just paving it over and exterminating the species. The EPA is mainly founded on the basis that we can't undo it and that preservation has a purpose for preservation's sake, not that there's any clear economic benefit.

I think they're pretty much in the same boat, long term as assume both NASA and the EPA are for the benefit of the human race but in the short term, they sure do look like an expense.

So what are you trying to say here? He3 is only useful in a fusion reactor and we don't have a working design. People have been working on one ever since they invented the H-bomb and come up short, we have enough He3 here on earth to experiment/test with. Maybe we should see if we're able to do something useful with it before we spend billions trying to build a moon mining operation?

Probably because you have a rose-tinted view of how it would work. Here's how it really will work: Big companies have lawyers and systems to keep track and will do the legal minimum to avoid "orphan" status. The little guy won't keep it available for sale, file the correct paperwork or keep up with his payments, giving big corporations a free source of expired material.

The price of registration would likely be a flat fee, favoring large commercial successes made by big companies over small artists. If it was tied to profit made on the work you'd see Hollywood accounting and it's not about the pennies they earn on Steamboat Willie, it's about protecting the Mickey Mouse character. Copyright should simply be way shorter by default, then the few exceptions who are willing to pay for a few more years can apply for an extension.

No, just no. Statistics helps if you have a process variation that approximately follows a normal distribution. It does nothing to protect you against freak failure, like say you're making creme brulee using a torch to caramelize the sugar on top but the spark to light it is only 99.9% reliable. That means 999 out of 1000 desserts will be fine and one will be a total failure, but you don't know it until it happens. Failing at 1/5th the design load is clearly outside any normal variation and tells you none of these struts can be relied on no matter what their average or standard deviation is.

As much as Google, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook and everyone using the word "cloud" would like to convince you otherwise, you're handing over your data to third parties who you really got no control over how they'll use or secure your data. Or if they in turn have been compromised by hackers or the NSA or whatever. While there's certainly a few issues with direct communication too like how do you exchange keys safely they're much more limited in scope. But my impression is it's not about "How can we secure data?" it's "How can we still make you put all your data online in a post-Snowden world?" because that's how they make money...

Looks like a much better watch hybrid, though I don't remember having a 64 color display since the 80s (actually went 16->256) it should do just fine for non-photo/video use. But boy, is that a lot of bezel.

Apple Watch: 1.53" display in 42x35.9mm case.
Pebble Time: 1.25" display in 40.5x37.5mm case.

Don't know if that's the display technology or just an availability/price issue, but since space is such an extremely limited commodity on a watch I'm surprised they didn't go with a bigger display. If they could fit a display Apple's size the available screen real estate in mm^2 would increase by 50%.

Most of the time the information would be roughly as useful as a C compiler telling you what loops it will unroll. Game-specific optimizations basically means "take the whole rendering pipeline, make optimized shaders like ASM, reorder, parallelize, cut excess calculations, use conditional simplified algorithms and whatnot to achieve essentially the same output". It's not surprising that most of these tricks will work on a game built by the same engine, but it doesn't extend to the general case. So it wouldn't really be very useful, instead of "photo" or "fps" the profiles would basically be one per game.

I remember at some point the AMD open source developers said that they didn't have manpower to optimize for different workloads, so they were going with a simple structure using only one algorithm. They guesstimated that they could typically get 70% performance, simply because past a certain point making some things run better would make other things run worse. At the time they were more busy making it work at all though, but it might have been based on experience from Catalyst. Remember there's a pretty big gap between DirectX/OpenGL and actual hardware, at least before DX12/Vulkan/Mantle.

Here's a secret for you, they already have a system built in to transmit your desktop to another PC, it's called RDP and been there a while. Being able to record it to disk instead isn't exactly earth shattering. But that aside, this isn't exactly the latest blockbuster movie so what's the hurry? You've got a year and by then we'll have actual facts and experiences. I'll be updating my laptop since it's at 8.1 and it probably can't get any worse while my desktop remains at 7 until further notice.

If Win10 really sucks I'll eventually upgrade (downgrade?) my gaming rig to be a pure "Winsole" machine for gaming but honestly they recovered from Vista so I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt that they can recover from Win8 too. It's not like I'm really asking that much, just not fuck up 20 years of the "normal" Win95+ style desktop and I'll be fine. Most of the time I'm not really interacting much with the OS anyway.

Sounds like acceptable terms to me. Don't get me wrong, I know I've been tricked for hundreds of dollars by a flim-flam artist but even then I got a nice but overpriced suit out of it. Recently I sold a boat and already at thousands of dollars I was thinking this is big money, make sure I don't get scammed or that they're just some mental case with no money. A car for tens of thousands I'd make doubly sure, a house for hundreds of thousands triply sure.

Life is too short to verify everything all the time in the greatest detail possible, sometimes you're taken for a ride, but it has to be proportional to the investment. It's one thing to buy a "Rolex" for $100 where you both know it's not the real thing as opposed to buying a Rolex for $10000 thinking you got a good deal. On a long stretch, maybe I could get talked into paying for a plane ticket to meet though I'd order it myself and not as a cash transfer. But this? No, if I ever get this mentally retarded just put me out of my misery.

And also realize that in many cases there is a for-pay alternative that's been almost universally rejected. "Free" e-mail? There's services you could pay for, who don't need to rifle through your pockets for a marketing profile. Yet for every one person who pays or runs his own server there's a hundred or a thousand signing up to GMail, Yahoo, Outlook (ex-Hotmail) and so on. How many will gladly pass up any news site with a paywall and get it for "free" from an ad-funded one? People are cheap, they just like to pretend they aren't but not many will put their money where their mouth is.

I know you're trolling but don't worry instead of VAT we get to pay capital gains tax like on other investment vehicles like savings accounts, stocks and bonds. And wealth tax too, if you declare it as you're legally obligated to if it's over a certain amount. If you're making money, you can be sure the government knows to get a piece of the action. The IRS does too, but on this side of the pond we occasionally see useful public services in return.

Not going to dispute anything you said but many feel that in-house/on-shore projects have the same problems of "throwing it over the wall" where the business side may or may not get what they want, that may or may not be made with duct tape by a developer who also didn't document shit and is about to jump ship for a better position elsewhere. Some of it is just that offshore workers are willing to use any hack today, screw tomorrow as either it won't be their problem or it'll be more billable hours.

Though I've also seen internal IT get caught up in a lot of internal bureaucracy and inefficient processes but since they're a "monopolist" the business side has no choice but to suck it up and hope that IT will deliver some day. Particularly one place I worked a person got sick so they hired a consultant to do his job, but nobody could find what he was actually doing. It was like straight out of a Dilbert cartoon, his manager was a PHB who couldn't tell a worker from a hot air balloon. I've also met Mordac, preventer of information services who upgraded to a platform where I couldn't do any work.

So it's not just the bean counters. I've been at places where the business side seem to jump on the chance to move to the cloud or run SaaS or offshore because fuck you internal IT. And sometimes it's not entirely unjustified...

A bit of the same thing actually, being able to return defective products is the law (the standard). Being able to return a non-defective product is a service (usually, we have a consumer only remote sale exception around here). It matters to the company because they can try to pass it off to a less discerning customer, who might not care the way you do. I did have an LCD with a stuck green pixel once, never felt it was that big a deal but then again I don't do graphics all day.