At any house brand computer store in China the computers come windows installed and activated but no disks. If you insist on an install disk the price for it is, amazingly, the same as buying windows retail. The whole activation system is fundamentally flawed, but the question is, how to make it 1) less of a pain for legit users and 2) harder for pirates? These two goals seem exclusive, alas.

You missed an important criteria - the ability to be pirated in certain locales.

You think Microsoft isn't intentionally turning a blind eye to Chinese pirates? I can tell you the main reason is that if people are getting free Windows, they're not using Linux or any other OS. And using free Office means they're not using OpenOffice or LibreOffice or whatever. Ditto Photoshop and any other market standard products.

Microsoft knows if they hook users, they're unlikely to switch. Why use Linux when they can use Windows and do all the stuff there? Same "price" and in the end, locks one more user to Windows. Ditto a program like Photoshop - ok, so maybe they use pirated photoshop all their life and need to edit a photo on a new machine. They try GIMP and get hopelessly confused, lost and "it sucks". Another winner for Adobe who continues their Photoshop dominance and holds down GIMP.

Sure, there's no revenue from pirates, but there is lock in and if you get people stuck on using Office, Windows, Photoshop, etc., they're likely o find the alternatives unappealing, stupid, or "it sucks". And nothing is better for any of them to say "I tried Linux, it sucks - it doesn't work like Windows and blah blah blah".

What TFA and Wikipedia don't say are what game his original prototype actually was. Presumably it was similar to one of the early Odyssey games.

He invented the Brown Box, which later became the Magnavox Odyssey. The Odyssey is unlike what we'd call a console today in that it didn't run a stored program - instead it was a collection of analog circuits and the "cartridges" really were plugboards that connected the circuits in various ways.

Basically it ended up being games like tennis, table tennis (a bit more complex than pong), and other bat-and-ball style games.

What are you talking about? I think some very early plasma screens cheated on the horizontal resolution a bit, but otherwise any HDTV (720p or 1080p) uses square pixels.

Depends on the resolution in use.

1080p and 720p use square pixels. 480p uses rectangular pixels, which is why 480p (720x480) has both a 16:9 and 4:3 mode even though they are the same number of pixels across.

EDTVs had to have non-square pixels because of this, and HDTVs do processing to ensure the aspect ratio is maintained when passed in 480p content (e.g., DVD, which is fixed 720x480, but allows both 4:3 and 16:9 content).

You are correct in asserting that the bank will know it's me. But nobody else needs to know that I've visited my bank. My ISP, government, and neighbours on wifi don't need to even know that I have a bank account.

Your ISP is paid for somehow. Probably a credit card, tied to a bank.

The government ALREADY KNOWS you have a bank account! In fact, they probably already know how much is in it, and how much profit you made in your savings account, your trading account, etc.

Neighbours on WiFi? What, you running an open wifi that your neighbours can use? If you're doing that and accessing the bank, you have bigger problems. WPA2 ensures that your neighbours can't see your traffic even if they're on the same network (each node gets a unique encryption key). But still... if you're letting your neighbours on your wifi, you should be hitting your bank over Ethernet.

The thing is, Intel pretty much buys the same equipment that everyone else has access to for fab technology.

The problem is the fab equipment is REALLY expensive and sourced from Japan, and it has to be that way in order to produce usable chips. With each wafer costing $1-3K each, sub-standard equipment brings the cost up VERY quickly.

In fact, this technology is pretty much open - even Intel has opened FinFETs to everyone, not because they're not cutting edge, but because if you can do it, you're already quite advanced (hint: it's not easy).

No, the biggest IP violations is not the fabs, it's the stuff the fabs make - the chips themselves. Because the next-gem chips are made there 6-12 months before they show up in products, if you can get at those, there's a very big advantage.

Fabs are expensive and require a ton of money. Intel has that. If China wanted, they could open their own fab, but they haven't. But it's not the fab that's important, it's the stuff the fab makes as they're often the latest and greater technology.

In fact, it helps businesses that do accept cash because they have a percentage of transactions that are not subject to merchant service fees so they make more profit by giving a slight discount meaning a business has no incentive to refuse cash.

Depends on the business. Small businesses do see the discount since the amount of cash is small enough that the cost of handling cash is basically nil.

Larger businesses can find the cost of handling cash is larger than the merchant fees - cash handlers get special training because they need to know how to reconcile their cash box, then there's actually making the cash deposits. Those can be big enough that whoever's carrying the wallet is a nice target of robbery. A big game release or something can easily mean a $50,000 take in cash in a single day, requiring hiring guards and armored vehicles to transport it to the bank.

What surprises me, given their popularity in education(and the fact that turning any old laptop design into a 'chromebook' involves little more than a firmware change), is that nobody seems to make a modestly ruggedized Chromebook.

  Among normal wintel laptops, the bottom of the range is dangerously cheap plastic crap that breaks if you look at it; but it's quite easy to buy various levels of ruggedness from 'adequate build quality' to 'actually designed with road warriors in mind' to 'yes, actually rated to an alphabet soup of drop, vibration, and other tests' to 'Toughbook' to 'Please Consult a General Dynamics Representative, and have your checkbook open'.

  Given what you pay for the really high end, the cost/benefit for student use tends to land somewhere on the toughish side of boring business laptop; but you can buy those easily enough. For some reason, nearly all Chromebooks are delicate little things, cheap and lightweight; but just not that tough.

Ruggedization costs money. try speccing out that Toughbook sometime and you'll find it costs a heckuva lot of money for not a lot.

Partly because they're niche devices that don't sell a lot, but also because the ruggedization means extra materials and assembly that costs more.

And Chromebooks are designed for a very price-sensitive market - they can't cost more than $200 before approaching "regular laptop" price ranges. And in the end, they may be more fragile, but with the data in the cloud, they're also a lot more rugged because if the student drops or breaks it, they just log into a new one and all the data is there.

There's also the cost factor - if it costs $50 more to ruggedize a Chromebook, then it means instead of buying 5 Chromebooks at $200 each, they buy 4 at $250 each. The 4 may be ruggedized, but if students are careful and they don't break one out of the 5, then it's cheaper to go non-ruggedized.

The other big issue with laptops is theft - and Chromebooks just aren't the target people wantak

I'd be willing to pay money to not have to use that piece of crap.

How can folks be so arrogant to assume that a professional hasn't got her workflows up and running? We are't thrilled to get *your* workflow and *the other publisher's workflow* all of them pushed down our throats.

And we, the researchers, libraries and students are collateral damage of the turf wars of the platforms. Thanks, but no thanks. Go play bingo or blackjack in some casino, but leave us the fuck alone.

I'll take paper over this mess any day.

Then use the existing methods, they aren't going away. And if you really do need access to Nature (or Science), you probably already have institutional access that gets you what you need.

This stuff is more about the public not having to pay the $10 or whatever to get past the paywall and read the rest of the paper. You know, the people who don't have subscriptions to Nature.

Now they do. Funny how people can now have a free option to read the stuff and it's not "free" enough, when before they had to pay.

Sure it's not open access. But you know what? It's a step. Right now open-access journals have a reputation problem (see that paper that got published about a mailing list?).

For those who hate it - well, the situation is the same as it was before - you don't have access to the paper. For those willing to run through the hoops, you just got access to it, whereas before you had to ante up. That's progress.

And that 6-month rule has always been there, so no changes.

Sheesh, the way people react, it's as if yesterday's access was better than today. Because yesterday you couldn't get at the paper, but today you can if you run through some hoops.

Not really been wondering, we already got to witness it first-person in HalfLife! Just watch out when you notice any resonance cascade...

Well, we're gonna be fine as CERN has Gordon Freeman working for them. He even got a crowbar

Should the time cops broke up that party a kid was at be available, in video, for the rest of the kid's life?

How about the time the couple at the end of the block fought and a noise complaint got called in? Should future employers be able to get access to recordings of people at the worst moments of their lives?

There already is a wonderful curator. It's called the courts.

The recordings must be kept, and they're available to the public. All the public needs to do is convince a judge as to what records you want (giving a date and time) and why.

If you want all the video recorded, then you have to convince a judge as to why they're relevant to you.

And if the police fail to produce records they should be able to produce, guess what? The judge can order production, or hold the police in contempt.

So if you're a kid that got recorded during an out of control party, well, your employer needs to be able to convince the judge that that exact incident is relevant for their business.

For crimes or police harassment, the date and time as well known and the judge can easily demand release of video around that time - even +/- 1 hour to give some leeway.

But try convincing a judge that you need all video recorded on December 1, 2014 from everyone. The judge will ask you about what incident requires you to have that much video.

I use Google Wallet where it lets me, in that I like the bonus layer of a virtual card. No need to panic every time a home improvement store gets hacked, or worry who gets my card info when I buy a Coke from a vending machine...

Given the way Google Wallet work, you may not be as protected as you think. Google Wallet works by being a virtual debit card - they use Host Emulation to be a chip card to a (I think) Bank of America debit account. So when you pay, the merchant sees a NFC debit card, and does the transaction that way. Bank of America then takes those payment details, forwards it to Google and Google demands payment from you.

If someone grabs that debit account number, that could be problematic because that's a debit account in your name. It also means Google must absorb a fee somewhere because the retailer believes they're charging a debit card and pays that fee, but Google needs to charge your card and Google must eat that fee.

It's also why no bank will create Google Wallet as a card-present payment - because Google is still charging your card similar to an online payment.

Apple Pay is really just a slick implementation of EMV which means the retailer sees a very expensive credit card and because that credit card was presented, gets the Card Present rates. The only "secret sauce" Apple adds is a slick way of adding cards.

Since I was born with speech and hearing impediments. However, I can socialize online decently (like this /. post) but many people don't like those. :(

The impediments are only impediments if you treat them as such. If you want to talk to people, do. Social skills are social skills, and if you're a genuinely interesting person to talk to, people will accommodate.

It may help to just talk (and talk and talk to exercise the speech path) and try to normalize your speaking to aid comprehension, but if you're someone who people want to talk to for whatever reason, a speech impediment isn't. And the more you do it, the better you'll be at overcoming it.

This system (which brings the shelves to the workers, as workers are MUCH better at plucking small, irregularly-shaped items out of boxes) has fascinating challenges all of it's own, mainly related to traffic control, safety, and where to put the shelves after you are done. (A fixed location is very inefficient, but neither do you want to stick the shelf in the first available space.)

The shelves are movable like you said. The position of the shelves within the warehouse can change depending on the hotness and coldness of the items within.

You have to remember the robots are not autonomous - they are controlled by a central computer tied to the ordering and inventory databases. The central computer is also responsible for knowing where all the robots are in the warehouse, what they're doing, and where they're going. And human traffic is easy to detect since the robots have traditional bump, IR and other sensors (which the computer can look at the path planning and stop other robots headed towards a collision with the first robot).

And this leads to the idea of hot and cold shelves - because the shelves are movable, they can be put anywhere. And in Amazon's warehouse (as is everyone else's using the robots), the shelves are arranged from hot to cold with hotter shelves towards the packers and colder shelves towards the far end of the warehouse. The computer adjusts the location of the shelves dynamically as need be - as a shelf gets hotter, its position in the warehouse changes.

Yes, it means that a company like Amazon can't tell you WHERE in the warehouse something is without consulting the inventory database because that location changes constantly. Probably easier to just have a robot bring you the item than to look it up and pick it manually.

Have you compared the average car in Germany with the ones in the USA? Furthermore, in Germany there are mandatory periodic technical inspections, and these are no joke. Half the cars I see in the USA would never pass these inspections. Also, getting a driver license in Germany is HARD, and the average Autobahn driver is very well disciplined compared to his USA counterpart (exceptions exist, I know I know...)

Plus, in Europe, generally speaking there's a very good public transportation system that one doesn't NEED a license to go anywhere. So drivers who do drive generally drive because they like to drive.

If you hate driving, you have a perfectly usable option of public transportation.

In North America, that's generally not an option except in a few areas, so the end result is you have a bunch of people forced to drive who would rather be doing other things. (Like say, texting, or prepping for the party or other activity).

So yes, they drive better not because they're better drivers, but those who don't want to drive have viable options of getting around, leaving the roads filled with people who like to drive, enjoy it, and are generally more skilled because they like the challenge. Not some soccer mom who'd rather be gossiping with friends or doing their nails instead of driving.

And that includes getting around between cities too - between buses and cheap flights, you can do a lot in Europe without setting foot behind the wheel.

I hate to be pedantic but....ahh fuck it, I LOVE to be pedantic....the propagation delay of signals in anything other than a vacuum is always a fraction of c. So the speed of the signals through a cable can be anything from 65% to >90% of light speed in a vacuum.

But at the end of the day, the propagation delay in the cable itself is still way way less than 1 microsecond, which is not perceptible in the slightest for a human. The electronics at either end of the cable are a whole different ballgame, and are the cause of perceptible lag and delays in a system.

Instead of guessing, you could calculate it, or rely on Adm. Grace Hopper's famous "1 nanosecond". At c, that's just under a foot. Adding 10 feet of cabling means the signal takes just over 10ns longer. If you add in velocity factor, .66 is convenient for copper wiring, that's really 15ns in the end.

And a microsecond is 1000ns. Or just under 1000' at c.