Or, and I'm just spitballing here, people could be adults and not think they're being cool and edgy by putting a dick somewhere on a map. Personal responsibility and all that.

Most likely it's because of those well-publicized dick images on the map. And the famous Android-peeing-on-Apple image. And a few others out there.

Quite likely what Google wanted was a way for its maps to stay updated, and what it ended up with was a virtual bathroom wall, with the exception that not only is it useless, it makes Google's map data even worse than useless if Google tries to rely on it for navigation or routing purposes.

"Turn left onto Penis way, then right onto Vagina Road".

Then there might be a concerted effort to "google-bomb" Google Maps and force a bunch of people down side streets that were reclassified as thoroughfares and all that.

The funny thing is - OpenStreetMap doesn't seem to suffer from this problem, despite it crowdsourcing all the map data.

I'm not sure why a simulator would ever want to bash people that hard. You'd think it'd be almost more jarring to have the simulation just stop completely -- lights go on, screen dark.

Easy, to simulate the event. If you're supposed to do something just before crashing, it would help if you simulated enough of the action so you can prepare for that as well.

Simulators are designed to train so that in emergencies, responses are practically reflex. If you're about to crash into the wall, you need to let go of the wheel or you risk getting sore thumbs from the simulator. Do that a few times and the driver will automatically let go even in a real crash (where thumbs may be severed instead of merely hurt).

Likewise in the helicopter sim - if you're going to land hard, make sure your tongue isn't touching your teeth. And other preparations you may make. It probably won't hurt as bad, but a little of it means if you're in the situation, your reflexes will make sure your tongue isn't where it might get cut.

One can be "in the right" and still not have done the right thing. For example, if the light is green I'm in the right not to slow down for the intersection. But that doesn't mean I shouldn't take precautions to check if someone is coming the other way. If I had I might have avoided the accident that was not assigned to my "fault".

Depending on where you are, even if you had the green, you can be assigned partial fault if you hit the idiot running the red (turning right on red, while legal, is technically running the red).

Sure it probably won't be 50-50, but maybe 25% your fault (you should've slowed down when you noticed the car pulling out) and 75% his fault. Even 10-90 is possible. The only way it would be completely the other car's fault is if they pulled out and there was no way you could realistically slow down or avoid the accident.

I don't think they really can. Companies set their prices higher because of simple supply and demand. Australians still consume these products at the higher prices, even though those prices are way above the minimum wage/cost of living differences between the US and Australia. It would require the Australian government to introduce specific price gouging legislation, aimed directly at media companies, and include wording comparing AU to other world prices for the product.

I thought Australia was already doing this by encouraging people to access stuff like Netflix using VPNs and such, even going so far as to have Australia Post set up a virtual sorting center in the US so you can order goods and have them shipped within the US, then bulk-shipped to Australia.

Of course, the problem might really be that the laws are such that to remain profitable, you have to change higher prices. I mean, think of a simple law like mandating that consumer products get 2 years of warranty. Pretty innocent, except it really means you're agreeing to the extended warranty - what may cover 90 days in the US with a 25% extended warranty to 2 years means that warranty price is built into the Australian price.

I mean, compare prices of stuff like Apple products - they actually turn out to be fairly comparable after you account for warranty (the EU and Australian models build in the price of AppleCare), taxes/VAT, and currency differences. Within a couple of hundred dollars in general due to currency fluctuations, but hey. (I pick Apple because they've been fined in the EU for selling AppleCare unnecessarily).

The real problem would be repealing the legislation - consumer groups rightly will protest, and some businesses will rather pocket the cash as extra profit. Though maybe ads of "NEW LOWER PRICE!" can help push the savings down

By all means allow multiple levels of service. Let customers flag some traffic at their routers as high-priority which gets better latency guarantees, of course at a higher price. Then users playing games could choose to have super-low-latency connections for the stuff that matters.

Wasn't this part of IPv6 - that QoS was built into the protocol? So yes, you can mark traffic as high priority and be charged for it as appropriate? It's handled in the routers so it seems like a perfect opportunity to monetize and speed up adoption of IPv6.

Of course, then the next malware hack would be to flag ALL your packets as high priority so you pay more...

This is not related to the SSD. If your cpus are pegged then it's something outside the disk driver. If it's system time it could be two things: (1) Either the compilers are getting into a system call loop of some sort or (2) The filesystem is doing something that is causing lock contention or other problems.

Well, it could be more than two things, but it is highly unlikely to be the SSD.

One thing I've noticed with fast storage devices is that sometimes housekeeping operations by filesystems can stall out the whole system because the housekeeping operations assume the disk I/O will block when, in many cases, the disk I/O completes instantly and essentially does not block, causing the kernel thread to eat more cpu than intended.

True, however, it seems to be caused by the SSD. As in the same machine with SSD and HDD, the SSD will cause the issue, the HDD will not.

And that's the real level of granularity I have into the problem.

I do note it only happens when there is a lot of I/O going on - even the simple act of tarballing a big build directory stalls out (I was actually trying to avoid this issue with the 840EVO by simply refreshing my build tree by tarring up the build onto the HDD, then deleting the SSD, doing a TRIM, then untarring).

The problem is it's not consistent at all. A similar PC (same model, different SSD and HDD) using an 840 Pro (and now 850 Pro as an upgrade) never suffered from the problem.

And given no one else seems to have found the issue with Linux, I'd hesitate posting to the LKML - the 840 Evo's have been out for ages, and if there was a real problem, it would've been reported.

It's just strange when you look at the CPU graphs in Gkrellm and it goes from blue (user) to all orange (system) time and even it stalls out. Like the kernel goes into some sort of introspective state where it contemplates the universe and ignores everything else.

Like I said, it may not be the SSD, but the SSD seems to be an important contributor to the problem.

As to consistent hardware, you're saying this like this is hard or special or something. PC game makers do just fine with variable hardware. Yes, consoles have consistent hardware but that doesn't mean much. That just means you have one version of the operating system with one set of drivers that are slightly better debugged than what the PC people deal with. So what.

It does generally make a big deal because the few AAA games around often break on "different" hardware which can involve merely owning an AMD video card on an NVidia game. Or vice-versa.

Luckily, the number of AAA games on PC is diminishing, and the indie market is exploding, where instead of driving each card to the edge (and thus causing all the problems), indie devs generally code for a common baseline, even Intel graphics.

And you have to admit that Windows does an impressive job at smoothing out the differences. Because back in the days of DOS, things were way more "exciting" in terms of handling differences. Nowadays, Windows presents a generally consistent API set so it doesn't matter what sound card, monitor, etc., you have.

Though, the BIG reason for consoles is easy - piracy. With PC piracy rates above 90%, developers look to consoles because of the vastly lower piracy rates. So when they make a game, the ROI is in consoles and if you make enough money, the PC port will hopefully pay for itself.

Why do you think everyone practically uses Steam? It's a cheap and easy DRM system that comes for practically "free" and offers enough friction that those who buy it will buy it, while those who pirate will pirate, and in some case, it's actually possible to track pirates. Doesn't do much to stem the tide of piracy, but the PC port of most games is a write-off anyways.

Communism fails when anonymous assholes can take advantage of you. Warning signs is when you feel someone is taking advantage of you, but don't know who.

Capitalism fails when rich assholes can take advantage of you. Warning signs is when you feel someone is taking advantage of you, but you have to cooperate with them anyways.

The reason we're stuck with sub-par economic systems is basically because human thinking is small.

Communism, capitalism, they work. In small groups. The problem is humans generally believe that if it works in small groups successfully, it will work in large groups just as well.

Think of it this way - there's a reason why we have two schools of economics - microeconomics, which deals with the economy on a small (personal) level, and macroeconomics, which deals with the economic on a large (city, state, country) level.

What applies to one system doesn't generally apply directly to another. It's basically the reason why we're in what we're in - we keep electing politicians who say things that DO make sense on a small scale, but do not scale and end up going horrendously wrong at the large scale.

Perhaps we need to scale it up from micropolitics that works at a family or village level to macropolitics that applies at a city/state/country level.

This is false. A pilot with a private (non-commercial) license may fly a passenger who reimburses them for the expenses of the flight, including plane rental and fuel. It doesn't become commercial until they make a profit.K/blockquote>

FALSE.

They may only reimburse you THEIR SHARE of the costs.

The FAA is very clear on this. There are several conditions that must be true for it to be OK to carry a passenger and get paid without a commercial license.

FIRST, the passenger's trip must be incidental to the flight. I.e., you the pilot would be going there anyways. So if you were flying off to see a ball game, and a friend asked if he could join you as he was going to a wedding, just fine. However, it is NOT fine if your friend asks if you would fly him for a wedding, and in the meantime, you discover you can go see the game. Your decision to make the trip must be yours and you would've completed the trip without the passenger.

SECOND, the passenger may only pay for their share of the expenses of the flight. So if you were flying as per above, your passenger may not pay the entire cost of the fuel. And of course, he cannot pay you for your time. If you rented the plane, he can pay for his share of the plane rental, but you have to be out of pocket as well. So if you're sharing your own plane, you're entitled to get back from him half the fuel, and half of the general running costs of the plane.

The FAA has made these clarifications even clearer because of aviation inspired Uber-type companies. Of course, this makes it truly a ride-sharing enterprise since they're paying their way, and you're paying yours.

Profit is not the only thing that makes a flight commercial. And yes, you need to keep good records because the FAA has busted pilots on this.

Of course, getting your commercial license isn't that much harder over a private's (especially if you stick with single engine land - you don't need multiengine to get a commercial, though if you do upgrade, you will need to take the commercial multi-engine), so if you really want to skate the line, perhaps it's best to just go for it. Then it's all free, legal and in the clear and you won't worry about the FAA. Especially about the first point where the trip is incidental and it boils down to subtlety. Did you really want to go there or did you make a special trip?

It's a lot like the ham radio "non-commercial" rule.

Get a job that requires you physically be there. You can't outsource the fry guy to India. Then the question comes back to whether your job can be replaced by a robot or computer.

Or, be the guy everyone wants. I know a pile of the /. crowd hate dealing with other people and would rather just talk to the computer, but that's basically the gist of the whole offshoring thing - if you're someone people don't see or interact with directly, it doesn't matter if you're here, or India.

So be the guy people talk to - especially customers. If you're dealing with customers, and you establish a rapport with them, quite likely they will try to follow you. This is especially if you're dealing with trust - if customers trust that you can deliver the goods, and are basically honest, they will seek you out.

We ran into this issue with a customer - the customer wanted to do a side project, and we were unable to do so (lacking the required skills, or so we thought), so they were going to contract it out. But they're uncomfortable - being the product in question is part of their "secret sauce" and they really don't want to risk it getting out there.

We're presenting ourselves as people they've already worked with, and as such, they already trust (me in particular who actually worked with them). If they trust me, they can trust my decisions, so if I bring in someone else from the company, they would be satisfied if I'm happy with them to extend that trust.

No, I do not work in sales or marketing, I'm just an engineer who doesn't hide in a dark corner of the office. I put myself front and center with the customer. Yes, it also means it's a PITA because I don't get to often touch the stuff as much as I'd like thanks to meetings and documentation and other project work, but it's hard to offshore the person the customer trusts to handle their work. Bring them a new face without my approval and they're rightly worried. And yes, if I'm attempted to be offshored, I will give them the training, but not the trust, probably because most likely, I don't trust them myself.

You put the face to the customer. If you're some anonymous engineer in the back no one sees, well, it doesn't matter if it's here or elsewhere, no one can tell the difference. But if you're a visible presence, and customers know you, it's a lot harder to have your work passed to someone else. Customers know when you don't trust the new guy, and customers hate it when someone they know and deal with productively gets swapped out for an unknown. Especially risky near the end of a contract since they may not have the rapport to renew and just cancel the whole thing.

We have a bunch of shared build PCs with 840 Evo SSDs in them and we noticed strange problems when we build off the SSD (over say, the HDD).

Basically what would happen after a little while (a month), all of a sudden during the build the entire system would practically lock up - all the cores are pegged at 99% system time, and system responsiveness collapses - it can literally be minutes for the system to respond. It makes a little headway, but compilation speed drops (since 99% of every core is spent in the kernel). It's completely fine off the hard drive, and if it wasn't for this loss in speed, the SSD would be faster (right now because it pauses a few minutes every 15 or so, the HDD is faster).

It's completely unusual - I did try to analyze the kernel, which appeared to have all the cores tied up in ext4 spinlocks. Not sure if it's a result of the tables being slow and blocking or what.

It happens under high load - I normally set the build at 12 threaded builds (8 cores!). Thought at first it was Linux collapsing under the weight of the build, but it's actually the SSD. Building off hard drive on the system system is no problem at all.

It has no power loss protection, so now it could lose data much faster. It should be good for worthless data but that is all. I am not sure if it has at least small capacitors, the half-assed power loss mitigation technique which does not protect new flushed data, but at least prevents the loss of old, unrelated data.

You don't need power protection if you take precautions and design your system around the fact that power can be removed at any time.

Some SSDs cheaped out and didn't have power protection AND used features that requires it (usually to get better performance - obviously if you're not worried about power dropping abruptly, you can avoid writing code to protect against it). It's no surprise those SSDs corrupted data liberally because their translation tables got corrupted.

But there are plenty of SSDs that aren't concerned with performance. In fact, if you're on SATA, performance is no longer important as they're all maxing out the SATA bus. If you're wondering why they all seem to be at 540MB/sec read and writes, that's because SATA is now the bottleneck. So now you can spend lots of time working on power-fail-safe firmware - because if you're stuck at 540MB/sec, it doesn't matter what performance tweaks you do because you're stuck there. If you can do 1GB/sec internally, and power safe code loses 40% of that, you do it. 1GB/sec is wasted on SATA, but you can save a few bucks by not needing power backup parts. 40% loss brings you down to only 600MB/sec, which is faster than SATA still.

It's why next gen SSDs are going PCIe - 540MB/sec is nothing compared to 1.5GB/sec you can find on Apple's machines.

Power fail is nice to have, but given everything's limited by SATA more than anything else, it's currently optional. For PCIe SSDs, you'd expect power fail components because you need performance.

Ironically, the faster it is, the less you need since you just need to dump your tables to storage ASAP, and if you're able to do 1.5GB/sec writes, and your tables are 500MB in size, you only need power for half a second. While if your media speeds was only 500MB/sec, you';d need power for a whole second.

I am getting tired of Volkswagon Beetle laptop computer. Intel is just now making a U-series processor as fast as an 4-year old M.
Are we heading into the computer dark ages?

Well, it's Intel branching out.

You want a fast laptop? They still exist - big, heavy, poor battery life, but plenty powerful and ready for the heaviest of gaming sessions or CAD or compiling or whatever.

But Intel's realized most PCs are "fast enough" so why not make a lower power chip so you can make cute, svelte, thin and light PCs that would let most people do their Microsoft Office work? You don't need a 3.5GHz i7 just to write a document in Word.

People who need the power, it will exist. But there's plenty of people who don't need all that power and would rather have a very lightweight PC they can carry around and last all day on batteries.

Yes, I know. I had to borrow an 11" Macbook Air for a trip. Not a computer I would remotely even consider purchasing for myself, but work had a spare and I took it along on vacation to serve as a travel PC. Well, I wasn't compiling on it, but browsing the web, emails, it was VERY handy. And the light weight and thin nature meant carrying it around wasn't a bother at all. Would I buy one? Probably not, but I see its appeal.

Hasn't "Don't roll your own crypto, dumbass" been one of the cardinal rules of security since sometime before WEP violated it?

The least you can do is implement a real algorithm; but screw it up somehow (key handling is always a good place for that); but just making it up? How did they sneak this past a standards body?

WEP used a standard algorithm - RC4. They just accidentally screwed it up because of the way RC4 works (related to key handling and IVs).

A homegrown algorithm for WiFi is TKIP, which was created because RC4 had hardware acceleration, while AES didn't at the time. So they created TKIP to leverage the hardware crypto alongside several protections to mitigate several shortcomings that were found.

Even for something as simple as AES it's a chore to find an open implementation that's actively being maintained and that works with your system; and when you do one of your expensive security consultant mandates that you stop using AES for being too old and not cool enough.

AES is fixed by standard. There is no need to "maintain" it - as long as the code compiles properly you're done.

And for AES, because it's an official encryption algorithm, NIST has the official specification document, and the original author has the reference code.

Of course, the vast majority of people will just use OpenSSL or LibreSSL, being BSD licensed and all that. Even on embedded systems there is often a reference AES implementation.

That alone should be disincentive to roll your own algorithm - the fact that the standard ones are available everywhere for practically no cost and very little effort. Why write your own algorithm when you can copy and paste an existing one in? Even the lazy should see the benefits.

While mandating new car use will reduce tailpipe emissions, driving old cars for maximum life, given they are maintained, will result in less total emissions.

The problem is maintenance.

If you have a clunker worth $1500 or so, you won't do anything to it that costs more than $100 or so - basically a tank of gas. If it emits a pile of smoke out the tailpipe, you aren't going to fix it because it'll cost more than the car itself.

Yes, not buying a new one costs less in resources. However, once you've reached the BER (Beyond Economical Repair) state, there's no such thing as maintenance.

And it isn't just a "poor" problem. Some people have figured that with depreciation and all that, they're only ever going to spend $500 on cars. (And it turns out if you're not picky on the year, you can pick up older luxury cars for that, so you can own a beemer or something for under $2000).

And pretty much all that goes into the car gas - the check engine light may be on since it was bought and it'll stay on until something catastrophic fails and it just quits. OK, it'll also get oil, But none of it is changed (even a $20 oil change is too much money), just replaced because it all went up the tailpipe.

BER also applies to everything else - people cry foul at not being able to repair things, yet the concept still applies - if your TV breaks and it's gonna cost 3 hours to fix, and a new one is $1000, you're so close to BER it probably is easier to just buy new.

Repairing may be better for the environment and all sorts of other things that iFixit's CEO can claim, but unless your time is free, economics dictate the reality. Either that, or iFixit starts offering a parts-only repair service where you send your product to them, and you pay for parts, labor is free. Otherwise people won't bother repairing and just "donate" the broken item to the hobbyist who will fix it in their spare time.