Quick caveat that needs to be made here: the US courts are free to request any data at all from Microsoft, and the onus is (as it should be) on Microsoft to deny the request if it would mean breaching a law. After all, what's the alternative? Have the government first make a request of Microsoft for the locations of where the data is being stored, then tell Microsoft, "hey, we checked, and the laws over there are totally cool with this request, so hand it over"? The system is working how it should: a request is made, and the entity producing the document pushes back when necessary.

What the government shouldn't be free to do, however, is to compel Microsoft to produce the data once Microsoft has made it clear that doing so will result in a breach of European privacy laws. So far, we're still at the "request" phase, and Microsoft is now pushing back. If the appeals court comes down on the side of the government though, that'd be tragedy of immense proportions.

No, the others had it right. To draw on the analogy some more, the US isn't invading Europe to open the safe deposit box: it's ordering Microsoft to produce documents that it knows they possess, which is something that courts all over the world are allowed to do and do all the time. As a US company, Microsoft is subject to US law, even when abroad (e.g. laws outlawing bribes in foreign countries), including orders to produce the requested information. If I'm the bookkeeper for an organization, the courts can order me to produce the books, regardless of where I'm keeping them. Doesn't matter if they're in a safe, the Caymans, or outer space, I'm still expected to produce them...or provide a very good explanation for why I can't.

And that's the important wrinkle here: producing the documents would force Microsoft to violate laws in the countries where the documents are actually located. For all the US courts knew, maybe Microsoft had a server farm in Redmond where the files were located, so it's possible that Microsoft could have produced the documents without violating any laws. Now that they've made it clear that isn't the case, however, it's time for the courts to decide which way things should go.

Even so, I think it's pretty obvious that the US knew full-well what it was doing and that they're not acting in good faith nor anyone's best interests. As an American, the last thing I want to see is that data getting handed over.

I hope you seized the opportunity to share at least 2 or 3 eyeroll-inducing "back in my day..." stories. Otherwise, I don't know how else you could have possibly salvaged such a fiasco.

If you bought all of the drives at the same time and they all failed in such a short span, the likely cause is a bad batch, rather than some extraordinarily poor designs on the part of the manufacturer. And while a bad batch does reflect poorly on the manufacturer, the fact is, all of the manufacturers have bad batches from time to time.

Isn't it the outer portion, rather than the inner portion, given that you can reach more per revolution if it's written to the outer edge, on account of the greater circumference? And if so, then yup, this is a viable technique for speeding up read times. OS X actually implemented something similar as far back as 10.4, where it'd move the OS and other frequently-used files to the outermost portions of the platter in order to improve read performance. I never really noticed a difference, personally, but Apple clearly thought there was one, given that they implemented it into their OS as a standard feature.

Sure, which is why you have proper logging that allows you to point them in the right direction. At least a few times a year, I have to advise users to get in touch with their IT department to fix their corrupted Arial font file or some other such nonsense since it's causing problems for our app (and probably a number of others as well). Where the fault lies is a tangential discussion, however. What matters here is that Step 2 is actually valuable at times, since it can assist you in answering #4 by narrowing down the possible causes.

If you get to the specific page for the US, it lists the following as conditions that were met:

Nowhere are any of those cited (at least not publicly that I could see), but at least a few of them do appear to be true, based on news we've all likely heard.

Similar in many regards, yes. Quakeworld, from what I understand and recall, focused on two things: predicting where you were going so that it could prepare those parts of the world in advance, and predicting where others were going so that it could draw them as accurately as possible on your screen even if the connection was slow (I may be incorrect about Quakeworld having this feature, where a predictive bot run locally on your machine effectively replaces the other players for a few ms at a time, but I know it's been in a number of other games as a feature to help smooth out visible lag). The difference, however, is that Quakeworld made a single guess, and wouldn't know if it guessed correctly until it heard from the input source again, so there could be some significant discrepancies between what was displayed as a result of a prediction and what the reality of the situation actually was.

In contrast, what Microsoft is doing here is making numerous guesses regarding which choice you'll make, generating the frames for each of those choices in advance, sending them all to you in advance so that they can be buffered, and then instantly displaying the correct one as soon as it gets your input to know which one it is. It's like loading frames for the next 200ms from a handful of alternate futures, and then selecting the correct 200ms once we know which potential future ended up being the actual one. Which is to say, the one it's displaying is always exactly correct, whereas in games that implement the predictive bot I mentioned above, people have been able to take advantage of the high latency and predictive modeling to invent new strategies, such as changing one's direction frequently so that the character model showing up on other's screens is rarely in the correct spot where the player is actually located.

Precisely. It's branch prediction, and they've effectively already taken it to the "next step" you outlined, since that's precisely what they're doing, with the frames from the predicted paths being sent to you ahead of schedule so that the moment you provide input they can display the frames that correspond to that input, rather than having to wait for the round trip to the server. One interesting technique they noted is that they can send some additional data along with the frames, allowing your local PC to make tweaks to the frame to account for slight differences in inputs (e.g. a minor change in camera angle). This seems to suggest that the frames may not be getting sent back as purely still images, but rather in some other format.

Regarding bandwidth, the reason it's not 1000% is because of one simple fact: most of the predictive frames are very similar to one another (as we'd expect), allowing for some rather significant compression to occur, which is why the bandwidth ends up being more around 150%.

As for the difficulty in programming it, in that regard, you are quite right. They were apparently using custom builds of Doom 3 and Fable 3 in their tests. But what you're essentially doing is forcing the server to process the same scene for the most likely sets of inputs that will occur up to the RTT into the future. Doubtless, most of the resources and computations could be shared between those paths, but even if it's just having to process four possible paths, things can diverge quite substantially during a typical RTT.

As for choppiness, at worst, it would be as bad as current game streaming services are (which is quite bad, in my opinion, but isn't the end of the world), and that would only last until it could reestablish the predictive paths.

For me, this is exactly the sort of thing that game streaming needs before it becomes interesting. I don't consider the current iterations to be in any way viable, simply because I have a basic understanding of physics and how the RTT impacts input latency. If they can do an end-run around the round-trip via a method like this while also making it simpler for developers to implement (e.g. some APIs to weight the predictive models and some ways to block out sections of code to run in parallel in multiple instances (I seem to recall hearing of Obj-C having a feature like this beyond your everyday multithreading, though I've never used Obj-C, so I couldn't say for sure)), I'll definitely be sitting up and taking note.

This whole attitude of "until you've seen what I've seen, you have no right to comment on it" notion is pure lunacy.

Yes, having seen something will change one's perspective, and yes, a person may be more capable of making a well-reasoned judgment after having seen that something, but the idea that they shouldn't be allowed to comment until they've seen it is a form of the very censorship that you're trying to stop. Surely you can appreciate the irony in your very own statements. I agree with you that people should be exposed to items and images that convey the horrors of war, be it images, memorials, or graveyards that stretch to the horizon, but once they truly understand that war is a horrible thing, I see very little reason to scar and desensitize them through further exposure. The idea that a prerequisite for being declared fit to comment on a topic is that they be just as scarred as we are is plain silly.

Without having seen it and without having any desire to see it, I agree with you that the video probably should be available, but that doesn't mean that places like YouTube or Twitter should be forced to provide it, any more than they should be forced to provide other content that they might find objectionable. Neither of those services are the appropriate venue for such a thing. There are other places where people can get that sort of content.

The Coin is signed on the back, just like a regular card.

Might I suggest reading about something before you spout off out of ignorance? Most of the stuff you've asserted is patently false.

Globally, at least in the 70 or so countries deploying EMV, yes, but not yet in the US. Most readers in the US do not use smart chips. Nowhere close to most, in fact. And the Coin is aimed specifically at the US market, which will continue to accept magnetic swiping for at least the next few years. I.e. For the expected battery life of the Coin.

Textbook FUD. Banks have not expressed any issues with Coin, nor should they, since it's actually more secure than a standard credit card, in that it can be configured to automatically disable itself if out of your immediate proximity, as well as the fact that it doesn't have the security code printed on the back, nor the numbers printed on the front, making it more difficult for someone to simply copy it for later. As I looked into it several months back, I was surprised to discover all of the common sense steps they had taken to make the device more secure than a standard credit card, while still being fully compatible with them.

Unless you're compromising the security model in some other way, there's little reason to be concerned, given that the storage is encrypted. And they have little reason to compromise the security of their own app, since that'd make them fugitives in a hurry.

It's displaying the last four digits (for identification purposes) and the expiration date, not the PIN as you incorrectly claimed.

Had you taken the 30 seconds to actually look into it, you'd have realized that it's possible to "lock" the device to a single card before you hand it to someone. Unlocking it requires either the use of the app on your phone or a pattern of button presses that you've defined in advance.

The best one I've come up with is that it has a battery that isn't user-serviceable, but that didn't stop me from pre-ordering one after doing my research, making sure I was satisfied that it actually was secure, and thinking through the various implications carefully. I'd love to hear just a few of your "million reasons", since you must be keeping the good ones in reserve, given that the ones you shared here weren't worth beans.

As was already pointed out to you, you have some of your basic facts wrong, and you seem to be falling into the far-too-common "I don't see the appeal for a product that isn't aimed at me, so this product is a failure" mentality.

The device will be 0.84mm thick, rather than four credit cards thick as you claimed. So yes, it will fit in your wallet. And it will do so about as easily as a credit card does.

Regarding the number of cards in a wallet, your situation is not universal, and many of us have valid reasons for carrying more cards than we'd like to carry. For instance, I have accounts with three institutions that have each issued me cards: Bank of America (checking, savings, and credit), USAA (checking and savings), and Chase (HSA). As a result, I'm carrying 8 cards with me on an everyday basis once you add in the ID and other miscellaneous cards (I'm grateful I don't have a company charge card to add on top of all those others), but a device like the Coin will allow me to replace at least half of those cards. My wallet is one of three things I take with me everywhere I go (my phone and glasses being the other two), so I am always interested in optimizing it as best as possible.

As for NFC, it's great and all, and I'd love to use it, but it simply isn't a viable alternative yet, if only for the reason that it isn't as widely deployed as swiping is. My grocery store offers it, a few of the newer restaurants I go to offer it, but the vast majority of older restaurants, shops, or other places I go on an everyday basis simply do not offer it from what I've seen. Making a VERY rough guess about my anecdotal situation, I'd say it's maybe only 20% or less of the places I visit that offer NFC, so that makes a device like Coin significantly more attractive to someone like me, since it's designed to work with the POS systems that are already deployed, rather than the ones that I keep hearing about but don't really see materializing around here yet.

But if you're living in an area where NFC is already widely deployed, or you're only having to carry two cards with you at a time, then sure, Coin makes little sense for your situation. And that's perfectly fine.

The Coin has a lifespan of about two years, since it has a built-in battery that isn't user serviceable. Given that the newest credit/debit card I have doesn't expire until 2017, and none of mine have chips, it would seem to me that registers will still need to be accepting cards like mine for at least another 3-4 years, which means that the Coin I pre-ordered last year will work as well. It'll be several years before the chips are mandatory, and Coin has plenty of time between now and then to engineer a second-gen device that deals with that issue.

Also, by most indications, the "register monkeys" are having no qualms with swiping these cards. They're all signed by the owner and swipe like normal about 85% of the time, according to Coin, which they're working to get up to 99% before launch.

Bingo on the ass covering. Everything about this reeks of CYA.

The teacher reads the word "gun", and while they are probably okay with laughing it off and asking the student to take the assignment more seriously, they know that if anything ever comes of it, they'll be fired, so they report it to the department head. The department head knows that "boys will be boys" and that this is just silly, but they have no choice but to pass it up the line if they want to make sure that they aren't the one holding the hot potato if the student ever does go off the deep end. So on and so forth until it gets to the principal, who takes it to the police.

The police should have had the common sense to tell the school they were overreacting and that they wouldn't do anything at all about it, or at the VERY most just pull the kid aside for a few minutes between classes and get a read on him while letting him know that it probably wasn't a smart thing to write, but instead they demonstrated extraordinarily poor judgment, leading to the situation we saw here.