Zero billions, because the auto companies' lawyers are quite aware of liability issues, and so they aren't going to allow the sale of any self-driving car to the public until they're damn sure it's smart enough to avoid running over pets and children.

So either the automobiles will reliably detect and avoid pets/children, or they will never be released to customers.

The bulk of the laws involving surveillance pivoted on this "Close" work. It was hard to do, and it required some motive to be "worth the effort". So in the old days where you needed to intercept physical mail or actually enter a property to spy, the laws were in balance.

Of late the state has had a free ride, with the information being pumped into it at central stations and spycraft was just a click away. And the state has gotten fat and lazy, and with the decreased minimum effort the spying has become free. And the state, fat and happy, likes it that way.

But strong encryption would put the state back into the footrace. It would require the same work and effort as the old days. Boo farking hoo. It was _supposed_ to be hard to spy. The entire Big Brother 1984 idea was about the destructiveness of surveillance made too easy to bother being selective. The "just watch everybody" economy of effort leads to gluttony and abuse. We kwow that.

So Omand's "warning" is that of the plaintive child. But mom, then I'll have to _try_ and I want my participation trophy!

So Omand has made the case for why strong encryption should be universal so that the state cannot engage in universal surveillance.

Consumers are fine. The only benchmark that matters to a normal consumer is "How fast does it run my games?" and the answer for the 970 is "Extremely damn fast." It offers performance quite near the 980, for most games so fast that your monitor's refresh rate is the limit, and does so at half the cost. It is an extremely good buy, and I say this as someone who bought a 980 (because I always want the highest end toy).

Some people on forums are trying to make hay about this because they like to whine, but if you STFU and load up a game the thing is just great. While I agree companies need to keep their specs correct, the idea that this is some massive consumer issue is silly. The spec heads on forums are being outraged because they like to do that, regular consumers are playing their games happily, amazed at how much power $340 gets you these days.

Bullshit.

Google are a highly effective propaganda company.

But, as providers of a platform for developers, they are absolutely horrible. Writing software for their "platform" is like building a house on quicksand.

They make me look back on the time spent developing for Microsofts products with fondness.

They support two prior versions of OS-X and that's it. So OS-X 10.7, released 3 years ago, is unsupported as of October 2014. I guess that works if you have the attitude of just always updating to the latest OS, but it can be an issue for various enterprise setups that prefer to version freeze for longer times, or for 3rd party software/hardware that doesn't get updated. Also can screw you over if Apple decides to change hardware like with the PPC to Intel change.

Since those guys are likely to be in full heavy body armor as well and humans need to see and breathe the face is still the weak spot, unless you got a high powered rifle or something. Not that you're going to win against a whole SWAT team anyway, but one lone nutcase who has you backed into a corner... I'd aim for the face.

Pfft, I'm getting 1.1mbps over DSL on a good day where I am. And my 4g phone, when I can get a signal, pulls maybe 600kbps. A 1/4 mile down the road our neighbor has cable at 30mbps, but he pays roughly 4 times as much as we do. Even with that price tag though, they end their line at the corner he's on, there is no service for us.

-Rick

I don't think I've seen anyone argue that the distribution of child porn isn't a problem.

I have seen people argue that the First Amendment permits it, regardless of whether it's problematic or not.

Between a bit better language design and superior support and tools, CUDA is way easier to do your work in. We've 4 labs that use CUDA in one fashion or another, none that use OpenCL. A number have tried it (also tried lines like the Cell cards that IBM sold for awhile) but settled on CUDA as being the easiest in terms of development. Open standards are nice and all but they've got shit to do and never enough time to do it, so whatever works the easiest is a win for them.

On a different side of things, I've seen less issues out of nVidia on CUDA than AMD on OpenCL for video editing. Sony Vegas supports both for accelerating video effects and encoding. When I had an AMD card, it was crashes all the time with acceleration on. Sony had to disable acceleration on a number of effects with it. I had to turn it off to have a usable setup. With nVidia, I find problems are very infrequent.

Obviously this is one one data point and I don't know the details of development. However it is one of the few examples I know of a product that supports both APIs.

These aren't just slightly confidential, state of the art spy satellites is top secret business. They'll be worrying that a SpaceX employee can plant something to steal technology, reveal capabilities, damage or compromise the satellite once the payload is installed. I'm guessing you need just a microscopic amount of C4 if it can hook into the antenna and wait for a self-destruct signal so that when you need them the most they go boom and the screens go dark.

And the developer generally means game engine developer, not game developer. If you want to write your own engine that's a pretty big job by itself.

Just a technical nitpick, old articles eventually get archived - I'm assuming to prevent spambots making replies and modding them up to get into Google results since there's no real moderators around anymore - so he won't be able to.

Depends on the nature of the relationship between the one who released it and the owner. Most likely it would go under "agency by estoppel" which means that the principal is bound by the actions of their agent as long as a reasonable person would believe it is within the agent's authority. There would be no reason for anyone to believe that the original release was unauthorized, so nobody is liable for copyright infringement even though Nullsoft lacked actual authority. Whether you can stretch this into using it as if it were properly licensed in perpetuity despite notices to the contrary is more questionable, besides not all jurisdictions may have the same estoppel laws as the US. But it wouldn't be an unreasonable claim that you found a code snippet apparently under the GPL and used it in good faith that it was authorized by Nullsoft.

This would not apply if some random employee decided to post the source code though since it's clearly outside his scope of authority, nor would it apply if hackers released the code with a fraudulent license since there's no principal-agent relationship, so in practice you might still become liable through no fault of your own. Making a process to declare something public domain won't change that, since it would be just as false as licensing it under the GPL. Or like buying stolen property, even though you had no reason to believe it was stolen it won't matter if the owner shows up and proves it's his. But not if you went to his store and bought it by a clerk who didn't have the authority to make that kind of sale.

Yeah, Babylon 5 just didn't give a shit about casual viewers - there was only a very few episodes that had a recap of past event. The first time I was tipped about the series I saw an episode in the middle of the series and was just wondering who, what, why since there was absolutely no way to get into the series. It really wouldn't have hurt them to have a 30 second "Previously on Babylon 5" to give you the essentials.