I started out with a TRS-80 Model I in high school. I spent a lot of time on that machine, and applied a lot of the "canned hacks" developed by others -- add-on hardware better than that Radio Shack sold, a memory remapper to let it run CP/M, soldering in another 1024x1 RAM chip to support lowercase video, jumpering the clock divider chain to effectively overclock the CPU, and so on.

Eventually, I noticed that I was starting to have wrist problems, especially when I used WordStar -- that WP used the non-existent Control key quite a lot, and the CP/M port mapped it to one of the arrow keys, which was an ergonomic nightmare. But I happened to find a pair of foot switches on clearance at Radio Shack, pre-wired to mini audio plugs. I drilled two holes in my system unit, mounted two mini jacks, and wired them to the keyboard in the same position as the shift key and that arrow key. Stomp-K-D for the win! My wrists were better in no time.

Later, I got a state-of-the-art 1200bps modem, but my poor terminal program couldn't keep up. Any time the screen had to scroll, I dropped characters. The solution: I rewired the 40Hz real-time interrupt to fire at 160Hz, and wrote a little interrupt-driven driver to catch and buffer characters coming in over the RS232 interface. It was completely bulletproof. Unfortunately, it also sped up the keyboard timing (repeat delay and rate) by 4x in CP/M.

I guess the biggest hack, though, was building a full character-based video display subsystem that hung off the expansion port. Forty or fifty SS/MS LSTTL packages spread across eight or ten solderless breadboards, with a couple of static RAM chips thrown in for character generation and storage. It ended up being something like 30 lines of 100 characters, comfortably larger than the original 16x64 display or even the 24x80 displays in the computer labs, and each cell was 8x16 pixels, so they were nicely readable characters. Luxury. I used that "in production" for a year or two, until I managed to land a Lisa.

> This guards against attackers unlocking a device with an image of the fingerprint

Now we will need a 3D rubberized printout of a finger body part with fingerprint.

I can't imagine any other industry that could drive this technological development to maturity.

Turing and "imagine" is normally in the same sentence with "powerful processor" and "Beowulf cluster".

To protect Pirate Bay and file sharing, or help crush patent trolls.

I imagine for those guys it's like Peter Griffin trying to decide between Ernest Goes Out and Ernest Stays In.

This is mostly going to be a benefit to cheating spouses who lock their phones constantly. The tech is mildly interesting, but it would suck to get locked out your phone because of a minor burn or a cut while making a hoagie. I can guarantee that this stuff can happen even with that technology. Facial and fingerprint scanners have been notoriously bad, even when they spend the money trying to make a better one.

Now as to beating it -- I'm willing to bet a piece of paper with the print with some clay attached and pressed into the shape (roughly) of a finger) could fool it. They aren't as clever as they think they are.

No it's not. It's really not.

Trump is probably a bad example because he goes bankrupt all the time, but pick any other hundred-millionaire or billionaire and look at where their money is. It is NOT in new companies. It is in old companies. It's in the stock market, chasing fewer and fewer stocks, driving their valuations to stratospheric levels completely divorced from the P/E ratio of the companies involved. It's creating bubbles in stocks, in commodities, in real estate, jumping from "sure thing" to "sure thing" with manic desperation. It most definitely is not creating new companies and new jobs. Look at the statistics for both job creation and small business creation. Both are effectively nonexistent.

Why? Let's examine the reasons.

The four Walton siblings collect approximately $3 billion dollars per year in Walmart dividends, every year. That's cash money that has to go somewhere, and even the most lavish of all possible lifestyles can't suck it up, so of course some large fraction of that cash gets reinvested. According to Forbes, the four of them together control $144 billion. Much of that is Walmart stock, but the rest is wherever those dividends have been reinvested.

Let's try to put that number into perspective. They could, in theory, get together and buy outright any but the largest 36 publicly traded companies in the world. That includes names like Honeywell, ConocoPhillips, Goldman Sachs, Caterpillar, Walgreen, and Monsanto, to name but a few. Any two of them could buy General Motors and have at least $16 billion left over. Any one of them could buy Tesla Motors and have at least $9 billion left over.

Except, of course, they can't. It's not possible. Even if Alice Walton decided tomorrow that she really wanted to get out of consumer retail and into car manufacturing, she can't buy Tesla Motors. The NASDAQ couldn't take the shock. She'd have to liquidate some large fraction of her Walmart holdings, which would cause Walmart's share price to go through wild fluctuations as other billionaires tried to figure out what she's doing and whether or not she knows something they don't know about Walmart's health as a business. The NASDAQ circuit breaker would kick in, WMT would stop trading, and her brothers and sister would be on the phone yelling, "What the hell are you doing?!"

That's at the top end of what's conceivable, but not possible. Now let's consider the bottom end. Say, instead of a big splash, Alice Walton decides to use her ~$700 million in 2014 Walmart dividends, basically pocket money for her, to start a new business. Again, for the sake of comparison, let's consider a subject near and dear to Slashdot's heart, SpaceX. Elon Musk invested $100 million into SpaceX by the 4th year of its operations, according to the New York Times, quoting his own public statements. Alice Walton could, using one year of cash earnings from Walmart, invest seven times what Elon Musk invested into SpaceX in four years into her own new rocket company.

So where is it? Where's the new rocket company? SpaceX has done its capitalistic best to demonstrate that it's downright easy to compete with the United Launch Alliance, signing 46 launch contracts in a handful of years, demonstrating vast untapped demand, demand that pundits claimed didn't even exist just 5 years ago.

Ok, maybe rockets are too hard. Where's the new car company? Not a Walton family endeavor either. Tesla Motors stock has gone up by a factor of 450! Isn't capitalism about efficient (read, high return) investment? Yet the Waltons are nowhere to be found.

Ok, maybe any capital-intensive industry is asking too much. How about a new knowledge company? Technology and knowledge work are The Future, right? So where's the next technology-driven startup, funded by Walton family pocket change? Google? Nope. Twitter? Nope. I could go on, but let's just cut to the chase. There aren't any at all.

So where is Walton family money going? $1 billion of it went into an art museum in Arkansas, including as much as $35 million just to buy a single exhibit for it. That's about the only visible thing it has done in decades. The rest of those billions in dividends have disappeared into 20-some-odd estate tax avoidance schemes, as if the only purpose of billions of dollars is to make sure your children unto the 15th generation never have to work a day in their lives, while not paying a dime in taxes to a government.

Because of that intended purpose, the wealth management companies handling those trusts are doing what wealth management companies have to do: investing in "sure things." Fortune 500 stocks. Bonds. Mutual funds. Commodities. Real estate. In short, nothing risky, nothing new, nothing that creates jobs or even actual wealth. Most of what they do just makes numbers bigger.

Why? Because the 400 people who control over 50% of the wealth in the country are the most risk averse in the entire country. The people most able to lose money are least willing to lose money, and this has been true for more than a century.

So yes, in effect, the money of billionaires really is sitting in a shoebox. A very large shoebox to be sure, but it's hiding, because of the massive aversion to risk of its owners. Even without the risk aversion, a very large fraction of it is tied up in artificially inflated valuations of a handful of megacorporations, unable to move because it would deflate its own bubble if it did.

There's more to be said, about the indivisibility of human attention and concentration and the badly erroneous assumption that it is useful to model government as a business, but this post is overlong already. I've detailed some of the argument how correct the GP's point is. It will have to do.

Even though the GPU makers focus on D3D and not OGL the GL performance is usually quite close to D3D. So when people start blaming their woes on OpenGL I start assuming they don't know what they're on about.

Who the fuck are you?

Right, you're just an anonymous coward, nobody cares if you die in a fire tomorrow. But one of the best-loved moderators of a public community? Everyone is going to want to know. Maybe the reason is "it was personal" in which case nobody needs to know more.

Yes, that's how the whole world works. You really think it doesn't work that way on reddit? Only complete fucking idiots would think otherwise.

No, they are taken seriously... seriously enough to be worth harassing. You have that backwards.

Support for social media? This means an NNTP client, right?

I want to be on the committee that decides what sort of behavior justifies drug intervention.

No, I meant there isn't much competition for email clients on Android to begin with. Inbox was something statistically nobody had heard of before Google, and both of the dominant Android email clients are from Google, one of them bundled with the OS and the other with typical gapps.

Is it professional not to tell the community why you fired an admin of a community site? I don't think that it is. I think that it's half-assed and can only lead to unnecessary speculation which could be avoided by being straightforward. The only reason not to make a public announcement making the situation clear is if they're not acting in their integrity, and legal wants to sit on the announcement like it's an egg and wait for it to hatch.

You can come up with a throwaway identity on almost any site. Very few take any real steps to verify your identity. That's not special. Reddit just seems to lack any sphincter control. When people act like assholes, they are encouraged rather than discouraged. So yeah, there's some gems under the turds, but mostly it's just a big fat circle jerk. It's not like Slashdot is so wonderful; Since Dice took over it's mostly been a big whine-fest since they keep shitting on it. But don't act like reddit is some paragon. It's the diamond in the cowfield all over again. Mostly turds, and if you go looking for the one diamond, you mostly just get shit on you.