Yes, they do. It's like saying "You can put a nude scene on the disk, and lock it in countries where the censors won't approve".

No .. you can't. Because someone will find a way to bypass your safeguards, and the censors will be angry. It's not a "cultural sensitivity" thing, it's a "this product will get banned from import" kind of thing.

> Maybe if the Chinese weren't buying so many U.S. Megacorp products this wouldn't be happening.

FTFY

> You are really stupid, are you? Monopolies are _always_ exceedingly bad, no exceptions. That is Economy 101, first week. Also, we are not talking about some general case, which seems to have escaped you, we are talking about Amazon.

If you are talking about a real world system, using the word "_always_", and calling someone else stupid, I hope you are being ironic.

Because there's _always_ exceptions to the rule, in real world systems.

Is it being developed by private contractors?

The US is required to make all their work public domain in the United States (kinda). But they can end-run it by hiring contractors, instead of employees.

It would be in the spirit of the law to require that all work by contractors is also public domain (to the extent to which it is technically feasible - I guess they can't force companies to release library code so easily), but they don't really care.

> from what I've read they're only comparable to current mid-range PC GPUs.

Yeah. But that's still shit-loads better than a 10 year old high-end PC GPU.

It's not about "real security" (which is too nebulous). They do make an effort, and spend lots of money ... on a big firewall to protect the whole org.

It's about protecting specific assets. For example, you can take the whole NSA offline, which is a fantastic moat. But if one single insider can get root access to basically anything he wants, it's not protecting core assets.

Most businesses are even worse - high risk assets can be sitting on a shared drive where everyone in the company can access them.

The iPhone is no longer a killer phone. Androids are basically the same.

The killer feature of the iPhone is no longer its looks, or its browser. It's the apps. A low-end iPhone will make the app market larger (so Apple will get their 30% on app sales / IAP), and will keep app developers happy (and make them less likely to target Android).

Apple has already seen what happens when a cheap competitor undercuts them, and steals all the developers.

OK, go here: http://thechoice.liberal.org.au/assets/js/scripts_a525ba27d7083afd6698e2641babf7ff.min.js

Find the bit that starts: decodeURIComponent((new RegExp("[?|&]"+a+"=([^&;]+?)(&|#|;|$)").exec(location.search)||[,""])[1].replace(/\+/g,"%20"))||null}var _0x8ece=["\x68\x74\x74\x70\x3A

How exactly do you describe it?

There's a thread on reddit Australia - some guy claims a Liberal Party Facebook app is harvesting data using hex-encoded javascript. I'm pretty sure it's against their own privacy policy, the Facebook ToS, and possibly illegal.

Requirements:

Make it better than the old system.

Make it work the same way as the old system.

Make it compatible with every else's system.

The only trade-off allowed is cost, since it's just tax dollars.

Anime fan. You forgot that bit. And people always try to rationalise his flight to HK as something other than "it's basically the only place in East Asia that's not a dictatorship, or practically US occupied".

Lots of businesses refuse to open cases to upgrade. They just scrap the old machine (or sell it, or give it to someone less important), and buy a new one. This is businesses, with professional IT staff.

Consumers are mostly even worse.

So the number of people who'll bother opening their cases is very small. The number of people who'll do so, and buy Macs is even smaller.

With thunderbolt, you can do a lot of upgrades just by plugging in a box. This makes upgrading a lot easier for most customers. And since that will be the only upgrade path, there'll be more (and cheaper) components than there are today. Plus, the resale of these components should be higher, since they won't just be sold to geeks.

So I'd say that the new MacPro will be *more* upgradable, to most people, even most professionals. Especially the ones who buy Macs.

> If all Linus is going to do is mouth off then perhaps it's time he just STFU and GTFO

Rubbish. I bet 99.99% of the time he's calm, collected, and insightful. But Slashdot doesn't report on "Linus explains why the new patch improving memory use in large systems is a great example of OO-style C".

> This is a huge blow for Apple

I doubt it. I've said (when Scott Forstall stepped down) that Apple realised that it's not in the data industry. Sure, they can do a bit in-house, but they just don't have the resources to cross the moat that Google has with its infrastructure, code, and expertise.

Apple does hardware, interfaces, and marketing very well. It leverages other company's products (its kernal, the BSD userland, GCC / LLVM, and Google's online stuff) when it lacks any real competitive advantage. Google is a harder pill to swallow (since they can't just fork it and modify things to suit their needs), but it's a battle they've chosen not to have.

Android and Glasses are what they should be focus on beating, and they won't beat them if they lumber their own devices with half-assed clones of the things Google does best.

IIRC, Intel did a lot of work on the whole system (including motherboards - I think they actually worked with other manufacturers too), not just the chip. Not all the savings are from the CPU.