Sure, but by which point you're doing much more involved forensics and hunting this down.

In many companies, a misbehaving computer is just re-imaged.

We used to have a receptionist who put so much crap on her PC that every couple of months when she decided she'd broken it enough, they'd just re-image it.

Why nobody ever told her to stop putting that crap on in the first place I'll never understand.

In that kind of scenario, nobody would even know she had any specific malware or what it did.

Warming is obviously a lot more complex than CO2 levels, because warming has continued to basically flatline as it has for decades now. So why are we still so concerned about CO2 emissions when the runaway effect predicted is simply not occurring?

There are simply too many natural processes in the earths climate that deal with variances in heat, most variances from other causes are vastly greater than the current minuscule levels of CO2 we see (they are historically high but factor in very little in terms of atmospheric mix).

If we're lucky, we'll get a nice 2C boost for a few hundred years out of all combined warming effects, before sliding into yet another ice age. Sadly I do not think we will be that lucky.

Honestly though, a borked Windows box often just gets re-imaged because people aren't all that surprised by one which has gone flaky.

So, you know your machine is having problems, but that doesn't mean you know you have malware.

And, as TFA says:

The code replacing the MBR makes the machine print out a message mocking attempts to analyse it.

Restoring a PC with its MBR deleted involves reinstalling Windows, which could mean important data is lost.

Basically it sounds like there's not much left to look at.

Or, alternately ... why would I rely on someone else in the first place? Why would I waste time and bandwidth copying my files around the internet?

I'm probably in the minority, but I still buy CDs, rip them to MP3, and then put them on whatever the hell I like.

I don't have ads either. I also don't have DRM, annual fees, or any of the other crap associated with keeping my stuff in the cloud.

Yes. They are going to learn very quickly that there is no such thing as "outside of U.S. jurisdiction".

Of course not, the US government has become the enforcement arm for the multinational copyright cartels.

Which is why industry groups write the text of trade agreements and then tell the US government to go implement it and pressure other countries to adopt it.

I think there is some kind of law that says all reports must be written in in passive voice

But, honestly, anybody old enough (by which I mean over around 30) who had a decent enough education had passive voice hammered into us for many many things.

Pretty much anything which was intended to be a factual reporting of something is supposed to be in passive voice.

So much so that when Microsoft introduced their annoying grammar checker it would give me warnings that I was writing in passive voice. Unfortunately I was writing technical stuff, and had no intention of writing "and then I'm all like pew pew, take that sucker".

By the time you're talking about anything written within the FBI, you're going to have this be even more pervasive.

I'd bet some of the Feds found Spot the Fed humorous...

Don't they surgically remove the sense of humor?

Honesty, just don't use max power.

Everybody takes a microwave, sets it to max power, and presses start.

You have 9 other power settings besides "incinerate".

Show some restraint, Grasshopper.

Not even close. They have on the research stage made functional 3nm FinFET transistors, if they can be produced in the billions is unlikely as it requires every atom to be in the right place but 10nm still has some margin of error. The end of the road is in sight though...

FX-8350: 2012
"Zen": 2016

The 40% jump is more like 0%, 0%, 0%, 40%.

If you compare a 3770K (best of 2012) to a 4790K (best of today) you get a ~15% frequency boost and another ~10% IPC improvements. If the leaked roadmaps are to believed Skylake for the desktop is imminent which will bring a new 14nm process and a refined micro-architecture at the same time as Broadwell missed their tick for the desktop, so in the same timeframe Intel will have improved 30-40% too.

Anyway you asked about AMD and I answered with Intel but it's a lot easier to get a meaningful answer without getting into the AMD vs Intel flame war. In short, even if AMD comes through on that roadmap they're only back to 2012 levels of competitiveness and honestly speaking it wasn't exactly great and AMD wasn't exactly profitable. They're so far behind that you honestly couldn't expect less if they weren't giving up on that market completely, which honestly thinking I thought they had. And I wonder how credible this roadmap is, I remember an equally impressive upwards curve for Bulldozer...

He wrote huge parts of it himself and in 2006 about 2% was still written by himself. I can't find how many LOCs it had then, but it was 5 million in 2003 and 11 million in 2009 so 8 million-ish. That means in the ballpark of 160.000 lines of code over 15 years, along with managing the whole project. And when that's not enough, he bootstraps what's possibly the most widely used source control management system today.

Now I've met people who are absolutely brilliant, they're rare. I've met people who truly excels at making everybody pull in the same direction, they're rare too. But I've never met one that's both, he could have been overly possessive and not let anyone else work on his pet project. It's one thing to say you want contributions, it's another thing to mean it in practice. Or he could have been the one pointing out a direction with nobody to do the heavy lifting.

Most of us don't even want to do both, the more I have to rely on others to get something done the more I realize how much I'd hate it if everything I did was manage other people. Those who want to run the business/organization/project get out of the doer role quickly, those who don't avoid management and get into some kind of technical guru role, to use a military analogy more like the special forces than a general. If you find one that both can do both and want to do both, you've hit the jackpot.

Somewhere in there is a Farside cartoon waiting to happen.

Nope. I had Microsoft take three weeks to pull a working SQL backup out of a hosted Dynamics instance.

So, SOMEONE was doing something wrong. But it sure as fuck wasn't me.

Why Was Linux the Kernel That Succeeded?

Why was the grammatical badly?

Do they make you guys demonstrate any proficiency in the English language at all?

Hey man, it's Android that's trying to get people to lick phones with the version names.

So, you put 10,000 lawyers and politicians into a hermetically sealed bag ... you launch that bag into space.

Once you've done that, get back to me and I'll tell you the rest.