This is the same weird logic used in health care insurance, which also wants to charge more or less based on individual risk. So if we follow their logic...

• They increase their accuracy in predicting who will be in an accident and change them more.
• They increase their accuracy in detecting good drivers and charge them less.

Extrapolating this out, they eventually end up charging each individual exactly what it will cost the insurance company to pay each individual's claims plus their profit margin. At that point, the insurance company is a useless middle man and everyone may as well be self-insured.

Web sites that use PayPal often won't work without third party cookies enabled. When you press the payment button, you end up getting dumped to the PayPal home page instead of to a payment page. Enable third party cookies and it works fine. I haven't delved into it too deeply, but I assume it doesn't effect all their shopping cart frameworks, because I have seen some site using PayPal that do work without third party cookies. Maybe Mozilla figures that until issues like this are resolved, disabling third party cookies by default will cause too much havoc.

Add to that, some satellite internet services use DSL for the upstream connection, which wouldn't work at all for a remote station in South America.

GlobalStar is a low earth orbit (about 60 miles up) satellite communications system that can do internet traffic. Latency will be much lower than a geo-stationary satellite. But speed will be low (about the same as a phone modem) unless you tie several channels together. To keep satellite costs down, the system is a "bent-pipe," so availability will depend on whether GlobalStar has a ground station somewhere near where you are using it. Having to license ground stations in hundreds of different countries is what really held back development of this system.

Iridium is also LEO, but has more complex satellites that route calls from satellite to satellite until it is over a ground station in the US, then routes the call to the ground. Last I heard it had been appropriated by the US military (they liked that all calls went through the US instead of ground stations in other countries). I don't know whether civil service is available any more. But it would probably also be a pretty slow link since it was originally designed for phone calls.

The law of unintended consequences would indicate that this could be exploited if corporations collude to use such a law to keep downward pressure on employee compensation. If none of your employer's competitors will hire you because of anti-poaching laws, then your employer has no motivation to treat you well because they know you have no place else to go unless you completely change careers, and that would have it's own downward pressure on compensation.

Considering the number of things the NSA has completely missed (e.g. Boston bomber, Snowden, Bengazi, etc.) I'm beginning to wonder if the NSA really has any decent spying capabilities at all. What if this is much like a Banana Republic, were the government puffs up it's chest and parades around a bunch of military men and equipment to try to scare it's citizens into line. But actually they are totally outnumbered by the citizenry, have very little real power, and they know it.

All these "leaks" about the NSA spying on everyone in the world could just be a desperate attempt by a government that realizes it has very little real control over people to try to keep people in line. Sure, they might be collecting a lot of data, but storage and analysis may be such a monumental task that they can really only figure out things in retrospect, which really doesn't give them much advantage over classic investigation techniques. But hey, some tech companies are probably getting rich over this.

Yes, this article is similar to others I saw back in those days, it is talking about experimental preemptable kernels. But it did not make it into any official kernel release until 2004. Still, it's there now, so good on the kernel developers for taking care of that. Question answered, thanks guys. (Except for the comedian that modded my OP as flamebait)

Isn't the whole point of 4K to just one-up online services like NetFlix? Studios can get a higher profit margin out of selling 4K movies on discs (if people are willing to buy them), but consumers and providers wouldn't have the bandwidth to handle a 4K video stream of the internet without a lot of expensive infrastructure investment (at least in the US).

Never mind. Kernel preemption was added in 2.6. Good for them.

Yes I already knew that Windows had moved graphics drivers out of kernel mode, and the loss in graphics performance because of it. That isn't what I was getting at. Windows is always interruptable and always preemptible no matter what ring it is executing in, no matter what ring drivers execute in. Is that true of Linux or not?

Not trying to flamebait here, and I admit I stopped following Linux kernel development about 10 years ago. It seemed to me, at least in the past, that a major roadblock to Linux being useful for audio, video, or real-time applications was that kernel-mode execution was non-interruptable. I remember there were some forks that made Linux more of a real-time OS, but I never heard of any of that being incorporated into any of the major distributions. When I asked a Linux apologist about this he acted like I was crazy and said, "Of course you can't interrupt the kernel, it's in kernel mode!" Funny, because Windows has been doing it since Windows NT.

Is this still the case with Linux? If it is, how can an application guarantee that audio and video won't experience hiccups? Just by throwing lots of CPUs and processor power at the problem? Better drivers would not solve this problem.

I wish I could remember more details, but about 10 years ago a UCSD professor did a statistical analysis of how often "creationism" and "intelligent design" where mentioned in news articles over time. The results was that use of the word "creationism" dove-tailed right into use of the term "intelligent design" right at the same time that teaching creationism in public schools was loosing ground in the courts. Basically, "intelligent design" was just a marketing ploy to extend the life of teaching creationism in schools. A "Creationism 2.0" if you will.

Okay, so how is it that the identity of this FTL trader is not already known, and being questioned by investigators?

Now will someone please explain to me how "someone" can collect on a trade and have it totally anonymous and untraceable?

For example, does anyone remember the millions of dollars in put options on airline stocks that were placed just before 9/11 (also placed at the Chicago Exchange)? Somehow investigators couldn't figure out who placed those orders. Last I heard the orders were traced back to an investment bank that CIA director Alvin Krongard had been chairman of. Then the investigations mysteriously ended with no one arrested and no one named as the person that placed the order. How is it possible for an order to be some untraceable?

FYI, GlobalStar was a low earth orbit satellite communication system. Same CDMA signal, but different RF bands, higher power levels (about 5W max), and usually connected to multiple satellites simultaneously (instead of connecting to multiple cell towers simultaneously, which is typical for CDMA cell phones).

But I get what you are saying. It is true that there was some concern about radio interference in the past. But it hasn't been for at least a decade now. And speaking of close to the ground, even when AMPS phones were the thing, there was coverage at airports. So there would have been the potential for radio interferences even from people that weren't passengers on the planes.

Back in late 90's/early 00's I was working for Qualcomm on a system that used eight GlobalStar UTs in parallel to offer a mix of phone and data service. In the experimental jet we had wifi routers connected into this system, and the jet's diagnostic bus was wired into it too, also a GPS receiver going full time as well (part of the UTs actually). We had several laptops, webcams, and phone calls going all the time - on the ground, in the air, during take off and landing - not one single problem, ever.

The ban on electronics, with the claim that it interferes with the plane's electronics, has always been bullshit. If that were true the ban would be for the entire duration of the flight, and it would be pretty scarey if flight electronics were so delicate that anyone with a cell phone turned on could screw it up. It's about controlling people, nothing more.