It appears that China does care if you want to smoke at least one certain non-tobacco plant in China, at least.

Yes. I think cooler heads will eventually prevail, and they'll reverse their knee-jerk decision to phase out nuclear. One only has to look at German CO2 emissions over the past few years to see why. Of course, until they do I'm sure the French and Czechs will be happy to sell Germany their surplus nuclear power.

OS X, unless you're willing to violate the license and whip up a Hackintosh, requires a computer from Apple. Linux doesn't, so, unlike OS X, it's less likely require you to buy a new computer in order to be able to use it.

Code that thinks it's cheap to look at all volumes needs to be introduced to reality. Spinning disks up isn't even the worst case; think about attempting to contact a remote volume mounted from a slow server, or a server on a slow network, or a disconnected server.

Mark Russinovich experimented a fair bit with this under Windows XP - there at least, you could actually kill off smss.exe and still have a working system; really, the only one you need to leave in place is csrss.exe, since that provides the userspace parts of the Win32 API, and without Win32 you can't run any "normal" Windows programs at all. Of course, you also lack important things like networking, making this rather academic - and you can't reboot any more either, since you've now killed off the process which handles that!

They are handy - ten feet off the ground, so all we can see is a strip of sky at an odd angle, and almost no natural light ever gets in, but it means we can tell if it's raining or not outside before setting off. I'd far rather have a/c though!

Morally and ethically, you have a point - but legally, no. Telephone companies in the US have specific laws regulating what they can and can't do - but if Google decided that from now on, any email containing the word "viagra" would get blocked from Gmail, that's up to them. Probably not a useful choice (spammers already use workarounds like "\/iagra" anyway, and the occasional legitimate email would get caught) but it is theirs to make. Indeed, this very site has a few rules to reduce spam and misuse - so you can't post very long words without getting random whitespace added (to combat the old "page widening troll"), you can't post more than a certain number of messages in one period of time - all rules they are perfectly entitled to adopt and enforce, since it's their own site/service.

Someone posted here earlier that the domain looks quite "spammy" on some of the heuristics Facebook and co probably use internally: it wouldn't exactly be the first time legitimate content got caught by a spam filter. More likely than a conspiracy theory about Twitter and Facebook being so determined to stifle criticism of TPP. As of right now, stopfasttrack.com is not listed in Spamhaus's database; probably someone got over-enthusiastic promoting it, and some of those messages got reported as spam. Nothing new there, either.

The question it poses is, how could such an advanced culture have staged such bloody spectacles?

So I take it you've not seen a movie made in the last 20 years?

Not Al Gore, given that he went to Harvard, not Yale.

Well, on thing that might not be going on inside those blobs is "running on the CPU". The Intel download page for the firmware says of the GuC firmware:

GuC is designed to perform graphics workload scheduling on the various graphics parallel engines. In this scheduling model, host software submits work through one of the 256 graphics doorbells and this invokes the scheduling operation on the appropriate graphics engine. Scheduling operations include determining which workload to run next, submitting a workload to a command streamer, pre-empting existing workloads running on an engine, monitoring progress and notifying host SW when work is done.

and of the DMC firmware:

DMC provides additional graphics low-power idle states. It provides capability to save and restore display registers across these low-power states independently from the OS/Kernel.

The first of those sounds as if it runs on the graphics processor - the host submits work to the GPU, and it schedules the work to be done. The latter of those sounds as if it might run on the graphics processor as well, saving and restoring the display registers from within the GPU.

So this might not be running in the driver at all; the driver might just be loading that firmware into the GPU.

The Markovian module (although, by comparison to Mr. Shaney's posts, that was, well, rather broken Markovian; perhaps it was published by the Dissociated Press).

Can you prove that the microcode running in the GPU isn't a binary-blob-in-Flash that will spy on you? What makes these binary blobs special?

Because I run Linux on VMs when I'm trying to do platform-specific work (and, as a core developer for a library with rather a lot of platform-dependent - and platform-OS-version-dependent - code implementing those attempting-to-be-mostly-platform-independent APIs, there's a fair bit of that involved).

As a result, I want to spend as little time as possible dicking with the OS, leaving as much time as possible to actually adding new capabilities and fixing bugs. Ubuntu seems to do a good job of that; if you have another distribution to recommend for this, please do. Note that, whilst I haven't yet had to do any kernel work (other people fixed the kernel issues before I got around to building a kernel with my changes), I'd like a distribution where the process of building and installing a new kernel is as simple a process as possible. Fedora fails here. (In the OS on which I last did kernel work, it's pretty much

make; mv /mach_kernel /mach_kernel.save; cp mach_kernel /; reboot

and it was, as I remember, similarly simple in the previous UN*X on which I did kernel work.)

"Sold here in the UK" does not necessarily imply "not built in India". The current 105 is another fine Microsoft product. I suspect it's built by Nokia at the aforementioned Indian facility; if not, it's probably built by Microsoft at one of the factories that Nokia did sell them.

By this, do you mean "the corporation named Nokia manufactures, in addition to mobile telephony infrastructure equipment, mobile phones", or "there are mobile phones that happen to be sold by Nokia", or "the corporation named Nokia makes mobile phones that they sell"?

If the former, are you referring to the phones made by Nokia's Indian manufacturing facilities? Those were one of the parts of the Devices and Services business not sold to Microsoft, as part of the deal selling most of that business to Microsoft, due to them being "subject to an asset freeze by the Indian tax authorities as a result of ongoing tax proceedings"? If so, that press release says that Nokia will use them to "produce mobile devices for Microsoft", so that they're Nokia-made but not Nokia-sold. I.e., Nokia is just acting as a contract manufacturer for Microsoft here, so they make phones in the same sense that, say, Foxconn makes phones; it's not clear that they have a long-term interest in being in the featurephone business. (Yes, I am familiar with the term "featurephone".)

Microsoft appear, at least for the short term, to still be interested in making featurephones, so, if, as, and when the tax issues are resolved, Nokia may sell the Indian facilities to Microsoft as well, finishing the job of getting rid of their mobile phone handset business.