I shouldn't have to remind you of the things in the modern world that depends on real-time instructions from software.

You are not one of those things! You GIVE orders to computers, not take! The computer is supposed to be your bitch. Thirty years ago people worried about Terminators, and now I find out that all Skynet has to do, is nicely tell people to jump off cliffs. I can't wait until Google Surgeon, when everyone thinks they should just blindly do what they're told, preferably with impatience and in real time.

Google Surgeon [speaking slowly]: "Snip the art--"

Doctor: [snip] "Yeahyeah doesanyoneknowhow tospeedupthisthing'sspeech?"

Google Surgeon: "--ery, but first, clamp off the blood supply so the patient doesn't bleed to death."

It is positively dangerous when you have to go round a roundabout twice for it to catch up! (In a 40 ton rig).

WTF? How can a mapping program possibly be dangerous or time-sensitive?

(Please don't tell me you are one of those MORONS who relies on software for real-time instructions, instead of having your own plan that was possibly originally aided by software. If you're a moron, then it's not the software that's dangerous; it's that some even bigger, stupider moron allowed you to drive a 40 ton vehicle (or even a 1 ton vehicle) on roads that might have other people within a quarter mile.)

All I can think of, is that the slowness is somehow keeping you from being able to review your route before you it's time for you to leave, so that you end up driving faster to catch up.

Just troll people with the question mark.

*sigh* You can lead a horse to an optimized process, but you can't make him apply it. Enjoy wasting your time diving for cover whenever any nuke goes off, while the rest of of snort, "Heh, he thought that was an H-bomb? What a dimwit!"

You say it dismissively, but the big thing lately is that Microsoft can play catch-up and is really trying to do it. Did you ever think you'd see the day? Starting around MSIE 9 they made huge strides toward becoming fairly normal, rather remaining forever obsolete, as a weird, special, anachronistic case. You never would have heard anyone say this in 2009 or 2004 but it now looks like a fresh Windows install might be able to surf the web, right out-of-the-box.

It used to be that if someone had problems and you found out their browser was .. well, they didn't know, but they said they just "clicked the internet" .. you'd tell 'em they need to get a browser, any reasonably modern browser. But I rebooted to do some testing just yesterday, and MSIE 11 does not suck. Seriously, I found more problems with Safari on Windows, than I did with MSIE.

Today's web browsers, in general, are pretty damn good. Even Microsoft can do this now.

From a certain point of view, they are huge.

I once read (*) that the full gamma burst from a thermonuclear explosion takes several seconds. (Whereas from a fission bomb, it's mostly over in a fraction of a second; the bigger-yield fusion bombs create a lot of temporary unstable shit that gives off more gamma rays as it decays over several seconds.) This led to me developing a nuclear war survival trick, which I will now share with everyone on Slashdot, even though I haven't tested (**) it yet:

If there's a sudden blinding flash in the sky, quickly try to estimate: does it look like a big one? If so, then dive for cover, preferably behind something big and solid, like a boulder or something like that. HTH.

(*) Wish I could cite a reference, but I'm lazy.

(**) If my trick is no good or based on misunderstood physics, you can make fun of me after the next nuclear war.

IMHO that's an excellent way of looking at it. If the chimp can persuade reasonable people that he can be trusted to not do that, he has a pretty good chance of being treated as though he does have rights. And anyone (chimp or otherwise) who persuades people otherwise, might find themselves being treated as though they don't have rights. (Shame about all the communications problems and other errors that happen in that second scenario, but it .. mostly works. Mostly.)

One computer, the fileserver, goes at the "awful location." This is the one that runs all the bandwidth-intense stuff (deluged, sabnzbdplus, etc) so you get to slurp up data at high speeds.

The others, you connect to that as well as you can. They're mostly just going to be running video players or web browsers anyway. It wifi or powerline networking is the best you can do, fine.

The first "online murder" happened the day they put weapons on a drone

Wrong, it's way older than that.

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern were murdered online. You're worried about the network being used against us, but hundreds of years ago, SciFi authors already went meta and had the network be used to murder a part of itself!

Sorry, but simply by adding "By entering this vehicle you are agreeing to be monitored" is all that is needed.

Today I Learned: writing a stated opinion or prediction causes it to become true! I think I'll put a sticker in my garden, "By entering this garden, it has rained today."

How does this prevent the non-driver from crashing it into a tree?

Take the recording out of the crashed car, to your desktop. Play back the recording up until a point where the car is near the tree. Then quickly hit a seek button that goes to another part of the video where the car is travelling down a safe unobstructed road. Click Save, eject, and then sneakernet the recording back to the car. Insert it and click load.

HTH.

Obviously, I don't know everything you observed, but 9-5 does not even hint lack of passion.

Already the industry is realizing what it needs to do.

Yep. In the wake of Snowden, people need to feel better. Performing encryption on a computer that you can't trust, is the best of both worlds and gives everyone what they need.

Users will be put at ease, manufacturers can check the "encryption" bullet point, and thanks to the computer working for someone other than the user, various other parties who "need" the data will be able to quietly get the keys without an unpleasant confrontation with the user. Everybody wins.

Except Netflix offers to deliver an entire bakery to the the table.

Yes, one bite at a time. You're not allowed get your second bite of cake onto your fork until you have swallowed your first bite, and you're sure as hell not allowed to have your cannoli on the table until after you have finished your tiramisu.

Say you have a waiter who isn't delivering your individual bites fast enough. Maybe he's legitimately crippled, or maybe he's just a spiteful asshole, but you're stuck with that waiter. What would you do about it? I'd tell the chef wearing the Netflix apron in the kitchen, to send me a whole slice of cake, and let's forget this whole bite, ack, bite, ack, bite nonsense. I'm hungry (and this baking analogy isn't helping!) and intend to minimize the waiter's impact upon my meal.

I suppose I see how using timeshifting to make speed less relevant, has a downside: it removes our incentive to increase performance. Ok, then go ahead and remain vulnerable to networking problems (whether it's due to your ISP being assholes, or because someone else in the house is using the Internet for something else, or whatever) for political reasons, both as a protest and to keep your own passion inflamed (so that you'll stay activist). But when AT&T starts suggesting that bulk video get special QoS, the bluff is starting to get a little too real. There are people taking this idea seriously. That is bad.

It's going to increase your Netflix bills and it's going to increase your AT&T bills. So here is what I suggest instead: take the monthly amount of money that they're taling about increasing your bills by, and spend it once on SSD or spinning rust instead, and stick that storage into your player computer (since apparently it doesn't already have any?!?). Have a download process that writes to files, and a player process that reads from files. Then don't start playing a video until you're pretty sure you're not going to "catch up" to however much has downloaded so far (or if that sounds complicated, then just don't play things until you're finishing downloading them).

You just saved a shitload of money, made it so that your internet speed doesn't really have an effect on whatever video bitrate you use (if you want to use a huge high-res TV at a house with a slow connection, that'll be fine), and now you're more resistant to "weather" (kid in other room's torrents, ISP-ISP and ISP-video_provider contract disputes, etc: all that stuff fades in significance).

What's not to like? Everyone wins except the spiteful waiter, except that even he just got an easier job, even if it's instead of the raise that he wanted.

That'd be a much better rant if Netflix actually, y'know, HAD a dedicated Tivo-like box to store things in. They don't.

I can't figure out if you totally missed my point, or totally got it.

Me: "This dog smells awful!" You: "Your rant would be better, if the dog weren't covered in shit."