Did I say "we're poor because US and EU oppress us"? No, I did not.

I didn't say we were any good. I stated something else: Argentina is never in a fair trade field. That has nothing to do with corruption. Even if Argentina straightened itself, the US and EU would still find some technicality of why they can't buy our goods or services.

There are plenty of people working with 4K video nowadays. Even "just" HD video. A lot of folks move a LOT of data with "just their laptop". It's a trend. "Specialized workstations" we only know because we're here, but the truth is, most people just don't want a PC anymore.

Want a shocker? A LOT of people are just not replacing their broken PC anymore. They're happy with what their phone or tablet can do. And if they do get a PC, it's almost always a laptop.

Only gamers care for "big rigs" nowadays.

Thunderbolt is dead. Apple was the only one to adopt it, and it was for only one generation. It's been replaced, for good or bad, for USB 3.

Scientology has Xenu the space-devil, and the alien ghosts that implant themselves in everyone's bodies...

However, I still think their tax-exempt religious status should be revoked. It was originally rejected for legitimate legal reasons and was only conceded to them because of bullying (via lawsuit-DDoS).

Worryingly, I've noticed more mainstream religions are copying some of Scientology's business methods. "Prosperity gospel" basically copies the way they make massive real-estate investments and buy lavish luxuries for top officials using donations from followers. Some Christian boarding schools basically operate like Sea Org on land. I don't think the time is far off when tax exempt status for all religions will have to be revoked to clamp down on these abuses. Scientology has let the genie out of the bottle.

You can enter www.yahoo.com any time and use yahoo instead of google. For a while now. Since Yahoo Search used to be powered by Google.
But anyway. You could also download and install ANY OTHER BROWSER, even using IE. Microsoft DID NOT force you to use IE to browse the web.
And Google is in a dominant position, and, while it doesn't force anyone to use their products or services, they showcase them in a very special way. Go to www.google.com. Do you see any ads? YES, ONE: An ad for CHROME, which, guess what? Is the dominant browser now. Fine. Let's say I'm the Mozilla Foundation: google, how much would it cost to put the Firefox ad in google's home? Google: "we don't sell ads for the google home".

THAT, my friend, is abusing a position of power.

First you claim the EU wants to be competitive, then you say it wants to be self sufficient and basically "block everyone out".

Yes. I know this. I live in Argentina, and we're constantly being hostigated by EU and USA. Americans want "free trade agreements" (where they reserve to refuse products from us selectively), and EU demands we "allow importing of their products" (while agreeing they won't be doing the same in return). At least the EU is a bit more honest about it.

I don't mind countries (or "economic zones") protecting their industries and jobs. I just hate being sanctioned for doing the same (Argentina constantly gets sued, even for subsidizing things. And of course, the courts are in the USA or EU, so we get no chance of winning. When we sue back, our disputes are ignored)

You can't call yourself "competitive" if you rely on a closed, subsidized market.

And yet, we didn't learn a single thing about the IE "incident". Chrome is the "dominant" browser now, and many websites are designing around chrome ("ugh, no one uses that SlowFox anymore!").

I had a security camera application (Ubiquiti's AirVision) running fine. It kept nagging me for an update. The update now only works with Chrome. Fuck me, right?

It hasn't been observed to do that...if RdRand was found to ever produce meaningful quantities of low-randomness output, then it should be eliminated as an entropy source.

No, it's not an issue.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...

RdRand could be 100% predictable and it wouldn't cause a problem.

ADA updates would be good, bringing in the Spark 2014 and early 2015 extensions would have been nice. (Spark is a mathematically provable dialect of ADA. Well, mostly. Apparently, you can't prove floating point operations yet because nobody knows how. Personally, I think it's as easy as falling off a log table.)

There are also provable dialects of C and it would be nice if GCC had a flag to constrain to that subset. Using multiple compilers is a good way of producing incompatible binaries and nasty interactions. GCC has no business having limitations. :)

With work on KROC at a standstill, we have a reference compiler that talks Occam Pi. Occam is a very nice language to work with but working through archaic Inmos blobs is tiresome and limiting.

Code quality in GCC and GlibC is still poor, the stability of internal interfaces is derisory (these should be generated from abstract descriptions, ensuring the flexibility GCC wants and the usability interface developers want) and the egos of the developers should be taken out and shot. However, it's still one of the best environments out there. Those that are better at specific things are usually carrying three to four digit price tags. I'd write in hand-turned assembly before paying for unquantifiable products that I won't even own.

Different animal. Cilk has specific instructions for parallelising loops and similar. It looks like a similar concept to Fortran's capacity to turn anything that can be done as a vector rather than as a sequential operation into a vector instruction.

OpenMP parallelizes at the block level rather than the instruction level. By all accounts (notably comments on the ATLAS mailing list), the performance is terrible.

Came here to say this.

List of Chinese nuclear tests

Furthermore, is denying China access to certain Intel CPUs that much of a roadblock? They can buy elsewhere or even make their own. Maybe even make their own clones of these very Intel chips.

This pissing match is stupid on a Cuba-esque level.

Hahaha you're a moron, it's more like saying "The temperature in Phoenix, AZ could become colder from August to September." It's still relatively hot, but it's getting colder. It doesn't imply freezing. Same with acidic/alkaline. Nobody said the oceans were getting closer to pH 0. And since we're dealing with a system that's already more acidic than it should be, I'd say to try to sugarcoat it with "less alkaline" for anyone who doesn't know exactly where the pH should be is disingenuous.

If "more acidic" implies anything else, maybe you should loosen your tinfoil hat.

I wonder if there's any way to keep this methane from escaping? Even if it could be collected and flared off it would be a big improvement over letting it escape into the atmosphere.

Maybe in the far future humans will become like the Irken and the tallest will rule over us all :-P