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Comment No file delta update--useless for encrypted store (Score 1) 99

OneDrive reuploads a whole file when it's changed, which makes it useless if you want to store an oft-updated TrueCrypt container, or other encrypted container. Dropbox, on the other hand, does delta updates of files. With OneDrive, every time you add/edit/remove files from your encrypted container, it will reupload the whole container. Unless you have a really small one, that's unacceptable.

Comment Re:Everything is an algorithm (Score 1) 263

Information production, writing, storage, and retrieval requires the rearranging of matter and energy in the real world. Information doesn't exist unless it has a physical manifestation. Indeed, physics places very hard fundamental limits on things like processing rate, maximum information density possible (due to Bekenstein bound), and so on exactly because information can only exist through its physical manifestation. This is the case even if said physical manifestation is just the neural correlates in your brain of the thoughts you're having on a possible invention. You cannot sever the idea from physical manifestations. What you refer to as abstract ideas are not fundamentally different from specific applications because there's no such thing as a purely abstract concept that is not married to physics, just as there's no specific application that is not also informational in nature. I stand by my original point -- it's all a matter of degree and subjectivity.

Comment Everything is an algorithm (Score 2) 263

At least according to some philosophers and physicists, everything corresponds to algorithms: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... Any patented process and device can be described wholly in algorithmic terms. Does this mean nothing should be patentable? Of course not. There's no sharp dividing line in these things, and this is my point -- there are soft lines here, just like there are soft lines between things that are best described as mathematics, and things that are best described as software processes. Ultimately they all reduce to mathematics, but that in itself doesn't make them unpatentable. The disputes here are on where along a continuum to place a threshold, and everyone has their own favourite point. The summary suggests this is lost on Mr. Lee, who chooses to see this as purely black and white and cut off anything that reduces to mathematics. The problem with that is that, if you were to take this to its logical conclusion, then nothing whatsoever would be patentable. Then again, Mr. Lee may just be radical enough to believe that, even if he's not upfront about it for strategic reasons.

Comment Re:Pissing war (Score 1) 250

If the NSA found a vulnerability they wouldn't tell the TC developers

You failed to address the possibility, one that has been suggested more than a few times over the past few TC articles here, that TC was written by NSA devs, perhaps as a side/unofficial project, and now that's come home to roost.

Comment Re:Where the fuck did people get the idea that.... (Score 1) 207

> "if I was neurotypical I would not be as skilled a programmer" [citation needed]

Post peer-reviewed, reproducible research backing up your anecdote, or I call BS. Only a small portion of good developers fall on the spectrum, and even if the incidence of ASD is greater among software developers than the general population, it's not that much of a difference, and, more importantly, still fails to back up your claim.

Comment Re:Simple life, not complex (Score 1) 686

Note that I didn't write just bacteria, but those and other "unicellular lifeforms", which includes archaea, and also most eukaryotes such as protozoa. Claiming that the distinction between multicellular and having multiple organelles is moot is silly, and makes it appear as if the point of your post was to show off or make an argument. If you really believe that the difference is moot, then you should be at the forefront of a campaign in biology to redefine the terms unicellular and multicellular (of course, none such exists, and instead we're shooting the shit on /.)

Comment Simple life, not complex (Score 1) 686

Bacteria and other unicellular lifeforms are the most evolutionarily successful on Earth by any measure -- numbers, biomass, adaptability to changing environmental conditions. The expectation that complex multicellular life is an inevitable product of evolution is unwarranted, even when looking at our own example -- look how late complex life came on the scene in the history of this planet's biome. Even less justified is the expectation that, when complex life evolves by chance on some place where simple life is present, it is unlikely to become extinct before it begins spreading through the galaxy. That assumption is without basis and comes from the same bias that makes people presume humanity being extant at some indefinite time in the future, in one form or another. A further assumption is that spacefaring ability leads to, well, spacefaring. Given our own experience, there seems to be a lot more focus on inner space -- the virtual world of information technology -- than outer space, primarily because the former is very cheap to explore in comparison (cheap in terms of difficulty and expenditure of energy and other resources). As the virtual allows us to bypass ever better the biological mechanisms which drive us towards taking real life risk and putting real effort into exploration and expansion, the impetus to move into space will remain weak and likely even weaken. (I'll acknowledge here transhumanists' wet dream of a nanomachine-based grey goo substrate for our minds eventually expanding to feed itself with more matter, once it eats up the planet, but that is extremely unlikely, and I'll point out that Richard Smalley's basic science criticisms of the futurists' views of nanotech possibilities have yet to be properly addressed.) Let me end this by noting that it is a good thing there almost certainly is no other spacefaring civilization in the galaxy, for reasons another poster brought up last time slashdot discussed extraterrestrial life: http://science.slashdot.org/co...

Comment Re:anyone remember itanium? (Score 2) 257

Is this post a joke? This change is far, far deeper than the changes of instruction set and CPU architecture that comprises the difference between Itanium and x86. This is about making fundamentally more powerful hardware on the most basic level to break the physical limits approached by current applied technology.

And that's just one problem with your post. The other is the criticism of different CPU architectures and instruction sets, pointing out Itanium's failure and forgetting the enormous success of ARM which these days runs in about 50 billion devices--and ARM is no less different than x86 than Itanium is.

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