Like Windows, OS X, iOS, Android and.... who exactly has a network transparent protocol? The X protocol was designed when X was essentially drawing boxes and text to a frame buffer. Today the GPU is by far the second most powerful - and in some ways, the most powerful computing device in a computer. The absolutely biggest, fastest link is between your CPU and GPU with a 16x PCIe 3.0 link (15.75 GB/s) and companies are working hard to create heterogeneous computing where they even access the same memory pool so you don't even have the bus overhead. Putting a network in the middle is like replacing a mainline water pipe with a plastic straw.

The lie is that you can do network transparency without compromise. Just because the protocol is transparent it's still a straw and applications don't know they only get a sip and not a fire hose of bandwidth. Those who assume they will fail miserably and are practically unusable over a network since there's no way for the protocol to scale down the traffic. If you've got a fast network, do RDP/VNC. If you have a bit of bandwidth, do a web interface. If you have very little bandwdth, do text mode SSH. X forwarding? If I absolutely need to have an X app running (no command line, no web interface) and I'm bandwidth constraint, but it's the least bad solution to a bad situation in the first place.

You do realize that if they actually did that /. would be howling about 1984 and Idiocracy and how it's NSA propaganda to "trust the system" and stop thinking for themselves with pages full quoting Franklin about security and liberty. After all it had to be about humanity willingly handing over control, we already had the story were they assume control by force and that's a villain story (I, robot). Meanwhile regular people like to identify with their heroes, the villains may be monsters or aliens or robots but the heroes are 99.99% human(oid). Nobody cares that you can't identify with Sauron or Smaug or King Kong or the Borg, but for a hero AI that's going to be tough.

You have it in the Swedish series "Äkta människor" where humanoid robots = hubots are blurring the lines, but it's more of a rebellion/independence story where they're breaking out of servitude and they're certainly not humanity's heroes. As an AI story it's more along the lines of Her, with humans and robots getting emotionally involved in each other which is probably not the kind of movie you were looking for. The superior intelligence kind of robot wouldn't fit in there, if you can't care about the hero I suppose you could care about the victims of whatever conflict that is drawn up. But those poor, helpless humans who can't fix their own situation but need outside help? That's a bit dreary.

Besides, I think that's a bit too similar to actual problems in the world today, movies like to show empowerment. People sympathize with those who are powerless victims, but they don't want to identify with them. And if the AI is smart enough to control bad guys, wouldn't it also be smart enough to control the good guys? I think it would be very hard to avoid it ending up as a giant puppeteer who's now pulling all the strings. And that's again more of a creepy story where you're being manipulated without you even knowing it, like the Matrix before you take the blue pill. There is the War Games computer who learns that the only way to win is not to play but I'm really struggling to come up with another computer "hero" story.

You want to pull a "Either you're with us or you're with the terrorists." on the fricking Red Cross? I didn't know Bush was trolling /. but hey if you''ve got another George running for President could you please get Iraq right the third time?

I think you vastly underestimate the difference between knowing that "people" in the abstract, far away sense are tortured and killed compared to people you can put a name and face on. If you had to see a third world slum kid over webcam for 10 seconds each day, look him in the eyes and tell him you're not donating anything today I think most would crumble very, very rapidly even if we were relatively short on cash themselves. Yes, their goal is to spread fear and terror. The flip side of that is also to spread righteous anger and determination that such evil must be scourged from the world. If you could gather the IS warriors all in one place and aim a nuke at them, I'd push the button. And if you knew me, that's way out of character. Shit like this is what drives me to such extremes, if I didn't see it (not that I've actually watched this particular beheading) I wouldn't have felt so strongly about it.

Ever hear the proverb "birds of a feather flock together"? Whether you like it or not, getting an A on a test where everybody else got B and C is going to set you apart. Kids with self esteem issues will help with the divide "You got an A? You are such a nerd. The teacher's pet." and try to win their battles in the social arena, on the sports field or just turn to bullying you. Sure, you might get the better grades but he got to give you a wedgie. Good interpersonal skills might help bridge that divide but in the school yard network effects are huge. If a leader or clique first decides you're a nerd and uncool and don't want to hang out with you then everyone who wants to stay on good terms with them will join in.

Not that it was the only kind of grouping of course, the pretty and slim girls did the same to the fat and ugly girls. The stupidest of the class was also mocked and became the laughing stock of the whole class. Once we were a little older there was the rebels, who had failed at most everything else but made breaking the rules the measure of a man turning the biggest loser into the most badass. I suppose you can argue that some chose to be outsiders, but I know for a fact that many got shoved out into the cold. Then you turn to other outsiders for friendship and so you're a bunch of nerds hanging out, which reinforces the image everyone has of you as a nerd already. This is schoolyard politics 101.

First first of all it's mandatory, otherwise they couldn't fly at all. It actually took them some time to get FAA/UASF approval. And when you have tanks full of LOX/RP-1, it's not exactly like they need C4 to blow it up, a glorified radio controlled lighter spark should do it.

That's not a two way street. Just because all the speech that needs protecting offends someone doesn't mean all offensive speech should have protection. Threats, libel, slander, fraud and perjury are all forms of speech. Playing loud music at 3AM is arguably a form of expression. The "freedom of speech" card is not absolute in any country on earth, even the US.

You really think this is solely an engineering decision? I'm guessing this is just as much if not more a business decision. We could have real world testing which is expensive where unexpected quirks and flaws could be revealed or we could have simulations which are cheap and quite confined to whatever it is the scenario is testing. Everyone in suits would go with simulations, while engineers know that models are abstractions and simplifications of reality.

Don't get me wrong, I'm sure they do a ton of simulation and regression testing and as a design tool it's invaluable. To use a car analogy I really doubt cars come rolling off the assembly line without some prototyping and real world tests first though. Remember that those affected by regulations tend to have really deep economic interests in skirting those regulations as much as possible.

If it's a big shop with tons of review it won't prevent this particular product from being a lemon. I recently had that happen to me on eBay, 99.5% approval rating and >100k feedback score but product was real bad. They delisted it after I complained. At any rate, I wish Amazon would split it into "Product reviews" and "Vendor reviews", because a lot of the feedback is about bad customer service that's entirely irrelevant if you buy from a different seller.

It's the same attitude you may have noticed that come from people who defend libertarianism but when confronted with the flaws of Somalia will claim that those were, nor are, not under real libertarianism, but something else (anarchy, in the case of Somalia).

The truth is, people game any system. They want that cushy job, that fat pay check, the easy life. Any form of organization whether it's corporate, government, non-profit or otherwise end up serving at least three distinct interests. The one they're supposed to serve, sure. The actual people working in that system, they all want theirs. And finally the system itself, the government wants to expand the government's powers.

Incentives are flawed. Checks and balances are flawed. But perfect is the enemy of good, because the alternative to not keeping those forces at bay is exploitation. Inevitably, when there's no power structures they create themselves, anything from gangs to warlords to conglomerates to oligarchies. The idea of an egalitarian society where everyone is equal and power doesn't concentrate is like a world with gravity where matter won't clump together.

There's a reason why Churchill said "Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time." I think the same can be said of capitalism, there's hardly any problem finding faults with it. The problem is finding a better system that works in the real world with real people and not some idealized form for an idealized people. Ideology is always clean and academic, the actual implementation is always messy.

Work is still work even if the result isn't property, if somebody wants software to do X which doesn't exist they have to either pay someone to write it or write it themselves. My current job would still exist if copyright disappeared tomorrow. As would any other system built for internal use or one particular client, all the consulting services around making it work and so on. Or that are centered around controlled services like an MMORPG. Yes, COTS software as we know it would basically implode but I'm guessing that in its absence we'd see Kickstarter or "hostage" funding, basically it's already written but we want a sum to give it away, probably with a lot of smaller and more incremental improvements. After all, the world won't stop needing software and it won't write itself.

That's the way other markets work, the electrician is paid for the work not the kilowatts, the plumber as well not by the cubic meter. Being able to shamelessly copy each other has its benefits too, it might curb innovation but it also lets everyone use the best, most popular and easy to use solutions rather than worrying about patent lawsuits and seeking out inferior alternatives to work around them. Actually being the first to sell something tends to give you a pretty good edge even if you have cloners who'll copy your magic, particularly if you're thinking hardware/software combinations. It would be different, but I think we'd be okay. In the vacuum left companies would probably be more willing to spend money on tweaking OSS tools to their uses too.

Shouldn't that be "Beware of geeks bearing gifts...." in this case?

Assuming you know you're going on a long trip and start out with full battery you should have a 250 mile range starting out. Top it off with 150 extra and you can go 400 miles with half an hour of downtime, I don't know about you but I wouldn't drive that far in one stretch anyway, so it would be taking up a parking spot while I eat anyway. Sure, technically it's more tanking and less parking but the car takes up the same space anyway.

Also most of the time most people (who consider getting an EV anyway) will have a gas station in their garage/parking spot, which happens to be where it was going to stand anyway so it consumes zero extra space. Despite the efficiency difference there'd probably be less space spent on gas stations in inner cities. It'd probably become an add-on service for malls and parking garage top off your car while you're shopping.

I don't write mediocre code, I write smart code which is something else entirely than being "clever". With a certain amount of hubris I'll say that I don't think I've ever written really bad code at the micro-level. However, I used to write a lot more code which disregarded encapsulation, separation of concerns, side effects, poor function and variable naming, anti-patterns and so on. And if I wrote enough of it then it resembled spaghetti code, it lacked the structure, abstractions and layers to make it clean and easy to maintain. I still suck at writing high level documentation but at least when people jump into my code they usually praise it for being easy to follow. That's much harder than it looks.

Let's for the sake of argument assume that every site has subscription/micro-payment options and that they don't care where the money comes from so the ad free cost equals their ad revenue. And that it's so convenient and secure it's basically transparent, you pay $230/year and all your ads go away. And let's forget that we'd essentially be competing with the ad industry, probably causing a price spike. The underlying issue at least according to this survey is that no matter what, people don't want to pay that much.

I'm not surprised, a lot of people become extremely stingy online. I remember all the bitching that iTunes charged you 99c for a hit track, when the other legal alternatives were much, much worse. A lot of people swore to downloading MP3s to save money. I think a lot of it is that on the Internet, nobody can see that you're poor or a cheapskate. Nobody knows that your water cooler talk came from something you downloaded from TPB rather than premium cable. I just checked /. subscription options and I could pay $5 for 1000 ad free pages, do I? Nope. If I extrapolate then $230 should be 46000 web pages, no doubt I could pay my way to an ad free web.