There's (at least) two sides to this:

Personal:

Credit agencies: So, this is a tech site, but before getting down-and-dirty with trying to fix his computer I would strongly suggest contacting the credit bureaus and put a hold on things. This will protect him from someone trying to open a new credit account in his name.

Credit cards and Banks: Depending on your level of paranoia, have him contact his credit card companies and banks and ask them to issue new cards. Of course, that may in turn require updating any pre-authorized billing he may have set up.

Authorities: Consider contacting the police and/or your Attorney General. They may be interested to hear a report of this.

Technical:

Forensics. If there's any question about needing to retain documentation about this, consider pulling the compromised drive and storing it. If access to existing data is necessary, put in an external enclosure, mount it read-only under Linux, and copy data from it.

Passwords: change passwords on all on-line accounts from a non-compromised system.

History: Look in whatever history information you can get. Take a look at his browser history, firewall log, command line history, registry, etc. This may help you to assess what level of damage you're dealing with.

Clean or Fresh? One can probably get away with formatting the drive and reinstall. But, in full paranoia mode, have him buy a new PC (cost of this provides reinforcement of prior warnings that were ignored.) Restore data from malware-scanned backups or from read-only access from pulled drive. I've read reports about malware hiding in USB keyboards and printers, so a reformat and restore onto the original machine may not be sufficient.

Family:

Possibly the hardest part of this is the fact that you're dealing with a parent. They were (hopefully) patient when you were learning all about the world as a child. It's helpful to try and bring an attitude of patience and tolerance to this situation. Let him face the consequences of his actions by having him make the phone calls to banks, credit agencies, etc. Let him pay for the cost of a new drive or PC. (Negative reinforcement) But also thank him for being honest with you about what he had done. Better this than to find out later he'd been scammed out of thousands of dollars because he was afraid to tell you what he had done. (Positive reinforcement.)

Finally: good luck!

Clock mesh technology produces a much lower clock skew compared to a conventional clock tree and, more importantly, is inherently OCV tolerant. On-chip variations (OCV) derated clock mesh designs generally have both lower skew and higher performance than clock tree designs. source: http://www.design-reuse.com/articles/21019/clock-mesh-benefits-analysis.html

Many thanks! Great article! Looks like getting the clock signal across the chip is an understood problem.

Which leads me to a question I'm not sure how to phrase, so please bear with me. At a high level, there's "data" and there's "processing". It seems to me that as we crank up the clock rate, latencies in accessing the data can be problematic unless the data is "nearby" I recall that Intel was working on Knight's (bridge? landing? something-or-other) which had lots of smaller cores on one die. IOW, it gets the processing and the data closer together. Is that the shape of things to come? What other technologies, if any, are available to keep the flow of processing at its peak?

Thanks again for the clock mesh info!

To avoid clock skew, you regenerate the clock. You can use a phase locked loop to sync to another clock, and generate a new clock signal synced with this clock but with an adjustment to the phase.

That makes sense! Thanks for the reply!

P.S. Editors - Please, more articles like this one! I *really* appreciate having a chance to ask questions, and learn from, experts in the field instead of relying upon dumbed-down, PR fluff pieces.

Any increase in performance without reducing size is a step forwards.If speed increases, for example, we'd go from 4GHz to 120GHz, which is at the low end of the scale mentioned in the summary (ie, it goes up to a few Terahertz in theory)So we'd be at the start of a whole new clock speed race.

That sounds great, but at those speeds the distance traveled per tick gets *much* smaller. I see a challenge in trying to propogate(sp?) a clock signal across the chip to have things work in concert with each other. I'm more a software guy than HW so I may be missing something obvious? ISTR an article here about a year or two ago about clockless logic. Would we need something like that in order to make a modern CPU out of this tech?

tl;dr How do you keep the clock from getting skewed up?

Have you considered astronomy or sub-atomic physics?

For example, Kepler, which examines a vast amount of data trying to find slight dips in stars' brightness to detect exoplanets. Contact the folks at planethunters.org for info and ideas.

Most any large-scale telescope's operation entails finding needles of information in haystack of data. VLT, SKA, etc.

Also take a look at particle physics ala CERN and the search for the Higg's particle. Again, analysis of vast amounts of data that I'd think CUDA skills would be of great help.

For starters, I'd search Wikipedia for telescopes and spider out from there on all the different kinds, and the projects they are used on. Ditto for sub-atomic particles.

Best wishes on your pursuits!

Disclaimer: I am not affiliated with this source in any way; just a very satisfied user.

Check out the free EULAlyzer which can be downloaded from: EULA Research Center. EULAlyzer works on Windows 2000, XP, 2003, Vista, and 7.

Example: I took a look at the Privacy Policy for /. which is located at: Geeknet Privacy Policy . "(Last Updated February 29, 2012) (Effective Date May 24, 2008)"

EULAyzer summarized as:

"Details: The license agreement above has a high calculated Interest ID. It's rather long, and there were a high number of detected 'interesting' words and phrases."

The "Flagged Text" Called out the following, each of which can be expanded:

• Advertising
• Privacy: ID Number
• Privacy: Web Bugs
• Promotional Messages
• Third Party
• Web Site Address
• Without Notice

Each of these are expandable. Each expanded item provides an "Interest Level" graph and a link to its place in the License Agreement Text.

PS: I've lurked on /. since before there even were UID numbers, but privacy concerns delayed my signing up. I'm quite frankly surprised at how extensive the policy is and that just shows me how much has changed since the olden days. I should probably check other on-line site's policies to see what's new there, too.

Yes, I can see the learning curve is steep, I must be missing something, though, because lowercase letters (26), uppercase letters (26), digits (10), punctuation (26), and "meta" keys like Escape, Tab, Backspace, Delete, and enter (to name a few) exceeds the 32 chorded characters mentioned in TFA.

I've often wondered if Morse Code could be a viable option for data entry on a small screen. Admittedly, there are some punctuation and capitalization issues with this, as well. Yet, it WOULD permit one to text while not requiring one to keep their gaze on the screen.

I suppose one could split the screen in half (e.g. left/right) to distinguish lowercase from uppercase and to allow additional symbols to be defined. I doubt I'm the first to think of this, but I've not seen anything like this being available, I thought I'd toss it out for consideration and discussion.

Thanks so much for the timely (9AM, on a Sunday? WOW!) reply!

Glad to hear the GPL should be fine, and I see you've given thoughts as to how to coordinate code/data contributions. As much as I'd like to see us able to contribute to the effort, I can well understand why a read-only repository may be necessary. People could still e-mail diffs, if they so desired, without opening the possibility of someone checking in a malicious update.

"NH mandates paper ballots"... thanks for the info. I've wondered about the feasibility of a two-step approach. Voter fills out an electronic ballot (which checks for things like over-voting, etc.) and then outputs a printed ballot which the voter then verifies and submits THAT as their ballot. The printed ballot is scanned, read, and retained. This permits manual AND automatic [re]counting. Though it might border on Rube Goldberg, I see some promise in the idea and offer it for your consideration, should the opportunity avail itself.

Again, many thanks for your efforts and may you have continued success!

I am impressed; well done!

I read the bill (gasp!) and saw procedural mechanisms to encourage the adoption of open data and software... not just a "thou shalt", but rather feedback steps to hold people accountable for the decisions they make. Kudos!

I also noticed in one of your replies in this thread that you are a geek and contributed to the kernel. So, I would appreciate your thoughts on what kind of open source licenses would be acceptable under this legislation. BSD? GPLv2? GPLv3? MIT? Apache? Obviously, you needed a *specific* definition of "open source software" to work from. Here is the bill's definition of "Open source software":

21-R:10 Definitions. In this subdivision:
I. "Open source software" means software that guarantees the user:
(a) Unrestricted use of the software for any purpose;
(b) Unrestricted access to the respective source code;
(c) Exhaustive inspection of the working mechanisms of the software;
(d) Use of the internal mechanisms and arbitrary portions of the software, to adapt them to the needs of the user;
(e) Freedom to make and distribute copies of the software; and
(f) Modification of the software and freedom to distribute modifications of the new resulting software, under the same license as the original software.

It seems to me that there would be no problem using BSD-licensed software. The wording is quite nuanced, though, and a careful reading suggests it was intended to also allow GPL software.

1. At some point, someone will propose using a GPL v2 application . Will that be permitted?
2. At some point, someone will propose using a GPL v3 application . Will that be permitted?
3. Can the state make changes available between departments without being obliged to make the software available to the public?
4. If the state uses GPL code to enhance in-house code, and distributes it to one or more users and/or departments, must it make it publicly available, too?
5. If so, where and how it such access expected to be made available? (e.g. public GIT repository?)

Okay, one more question: Electronic Voting Machines -- What impact do you see this law having on their design and selection?

Thank-you for your efforts to get this law passed; I look forward to your responses!

Sorry that I don't know the author, but I've found much wisdom in those few words. Perhaps it explains why puns and double entendre(sp?) are so popular?

The first top 500 list was published in June 1993. The fastest computer on that list was a CM-5/1024 made by Thinking Machines Corporation. It was rated at: 59.70 Rmax(GFs) and 131.00 Rpeak(GFs).

Last place on that first top 500 list (scroll down) was held by a VP-200 made by Fujitsu/SNI which had 1 core and was rated at 0.422 Rmax(GFs) and 0.533 Rpeak(GFs).

I've heard the expression about carrying a supercomputer in your pocket - how close are we? I'd expect most of the latest Android/iPhone/smartphones can beat that last-place finisher from 1993. I'm doubtful that any of these devices could beat that first place finisher, but I suspect desktops (especially with GPUs) should be there by now. If you're are interested, you can get the software from here.

Any takers? How does YOUR system compare?