Math, physical sciences, and engineering are slightly different in this regard. It's not about chugging numbers, it's about getting practice with the methods you were supposed to learn to solve problems. The issue isn't so much "solve this integral", it's "show that you know how to do integration by parts". Even though there are concrete numbers to make it more "real" for some students, or at least more tractable (so you don't have long strings of abstract variables), practicing is there for the practicing of concepts.

I'll grant you, though, that in subjects like history, assignments, test, and quizzes ought to be more conceptual. Students don't care (nor should they) whether a specific event happened in 1565 or 1566. Memorizing names, dates, sequences (of monarchs, e.g.), etc. has absolutely 0 meaning. Learning how two events, people, etc. interacted and why does.

How secret can this secret key be, if every camera has to store it I'n order to take "verified" photographs? They tried it with DVD, they tried it with blu-ray, they tried it with the PS3. It just doesn't work like that.

Except that if such information is stored with the photo, it can by definition be altered when the photo is altered.

Except spammers are too lazy to implement this (for now). Any email address can be found and spammed, unless it's completely unused. The only way to prevent spam is to exploit spammers' laziness. As long as the majority of email addresses they buy don't use the '+' exploit, they won't notice, and even if they do, it will be cost-ineffective for them to strip out the '+' addresses.

This is not a method to safeguard your privacy. It's a method to reduce your spam.

Premise 1: The Nobel Peace Prize is to be awarded to the person who "...shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses."

Premise 2: Wikileaks is a whistleblowing site.

Premise 3: "Secret secrets are no fun. Secret secrets hurt someone."

Argument: Wikileaks reveal secrets. Secrets discourage "fraternity between nations", specifically between nations that aren't privy to the secrets. Although there may be tension in the short run, along with the corresponding increase in standing armies and reduction in fraternity between nations that share the secrets, in the long run, the fewer secrets that are secret, the more nations realize that they can't do bad things in secret, and thus the better the situation becomes between nations.

Conclusion: Wikileaks merits the Nobel Peace Prize.

Agreed. The problem is, there's no standardized way to access a codec for any OS, no robust API, and there pretty much can't be.

If a new codec comes along with a feature (say, multiple streams, or user interaction, or anything) that the OS codec API writers didn't anticipate, it can't use the codec API anymore, which means we're back to the situation of plugins for everything.

Additionally, if two programs you install (think Windows, not Linux) come with two different implementations of, say, the Ogg Theora codec, which one gets used? There are just too many things broken with the Windows model of doing things that something like this would be infeasible and unmaintainable.

And I'm not saying Linux or OSX are any better: I don't have experience with OSX, but as far as Linux goes, its problem is the opposite. I doesn't have too few standards, it has too many (although GStreamer seems to be dominating at the moment).

Successful troll is successful.

That would still be fixable by a reboot. More likely, it's that they made a wire too thin or a transistor (or a couple hundred) too big or too small, or some bad combination thereof. That in itself could make the logic not meet timing under certain conditions, but it wouldn't degrade over time.

If things were really bad, this could create localized heat pockets which could damage transistors, altering their device parameters over time, causing them to miss timing margins more and more drastically.

It's not even that they're hardwired. It's that they can't change the keys and stop accepting the old ones, because then legit customers can't play games they purchased before date X.

They can't even update the public keys, because there's no way to verify that it's the legit new public key unless it's been signed by the old private key, which has already been found, unless they have some other super secret key just for signing other keys that hasn't been found yet.

Although the summary is bad, this seems like a known phenomenon. I'm pretty sure they mean that 66% of the content by number of .torrent files, or 75% by GB downloaded is first-seeded by about 100 people. Honestly, the number is probably closer to 1000, but it's still a relatively small number.

Now, I don't know how movies or music go, but as far is pirating games, there is a relatively small number of people or cells that are responsible for obtaining, cracking, and first-seeding the games.

You are correct. Currently, DRAM stores information as a N-channel MOSFET attached to a capacitor. This MOSFET is leaky. There's no getting around this leakage. This leakage acts to discharge the capacitor where the bit is stored.

You can try to decrease this leakage in a number of ways. You can increase the threshold voltage of the gate, but that means you'd have to increase the voltage the DRAM operates at as well, or else you wouldn't be able to charge the capacitor. This means you'd increase the energy-per-operation of the DRAM cell, because you'd have to charge the capacitor up more. You'd burn up more power, because the leakage is proportional to the operating voltage, but the charging energy is proportional to the square of the voltage.

Alternatively, you could increase the capacitance. But this means that the capacitor would take longer to charge, slowing down every operation. Also, doubling the capacitor size means doubling the energy it stores (and therefore burns with every operation). It also makes the DRAM cells bigger, meaning you can't fit as many on a silicon wafer.

Neither of these is what you want to do. In fact, you want to do the opposite for traditional DRAMs. It's counterintuitive, but you get more density, more speed, and less power by increasing the refresh rate (or rather, increasing the refresh rate is a side-effect of all of those). Unfortunately, lithography limits and quantum mechanics mean we're having a hard time going any smaller.

It's truly amazing what we can do. The oxide layer (essentially a layer of quartz glass between metal and silicon) on a MOS these days is 5 atoms thick. We're going to have to come up with something that relies on something other than the traditional semiconductor effects if we want to continue forward.

Perhaps, though, you shouldn't count time from product release, but from locking it down too much. Apple released a product that was unacceptably locked down. Sony released a product that was acceptably open, and then unacceptably locked it down at a later date.

Even though it's the OS's responsibility to ensure normal applications can't simply do whatever they want, the CPU needs to provide the necessary functionality. If the CPU allows writing to some register and provides no method of protecting that write, and that write causes anything that normally would not be allowed, then the OS can do bugger all about it.

I've always thought I should pay a reasonable fixed rate for support, and that whoever calls the software reliable should pay me on a per-incident basis whenever it breaks. If I make out in the long run, that's just incentive to make it more reliable.

Except there is already a tax on recordable media (CDs and the like). The problem is that they want to end copyright infringement, and profit from it too. The tax on blank CDs exists because of the implication that they will go to copying music. But for some reason, that doesn't explicitly or implicitly give you license to actually do the copying. I'm all for the tax, so long as it gives me blanket permission to do whatever I want with the CDs.