Seriously. To do any serious task requires state, and the problem with a minimal shell is that it can't remember much. The major scripting languages where all written to solve this problem, as well as integrate with embedded code in C. I'm a fan of Tcl myself, but virtually any scripting engine would be an improvement to a network enabled Pseudo-BASH with a whitespace delimited language.

No it's not. Terrorism is activity meant to terrorize an entire population and/or influence the public policy of a Government. Falsely reporting an incident does not rise to the level of terrorism and when people keep using the 'T' word to cover all manner of crimes that aren't terrorism they undermine the meaning and impact of the word.

If you can develop a working fusion engine you'll have so much fucking money that it won't matter. Seriously, you'll be able to swim in your money like Scrooge McDuck. I highly doubt that Boeing's patent is a deal-breaker for the person that's smart enough to solve this engineering challenge. "Aww, shucks, I was going to change the course of human civilization but now I've got lawyers and paperwork to deal with. Screw it, I'm gonna go watch American Idol."

Felony endangerment doesn't garner a 10 year sentence in any American State that I'm familiar with, much less in Canada. That's the whole point of this subthread, I was questioning the person that said "at least 10 years" for this offense. Adults wouldn't get ten years for doing it; a juvenile certainly won't.

By trying to not say too much, the advisories are inherently vague and therefore can be interpreted as insignificant or a dire emergency depending on the day.

That's not useful to anyone.

Because the NSA and GCHQ have effectively eliminated all network security, thanks to their backdoors in things like Cisco devices, it should be automatically assumed that all the bad guys capable of exploiting the issue already have all the information they need and the bad guys not capable of exploiting the issue aren't an issue whether informed or not.

Advisories should therefore declare everything. Absolutely everything. And it should be made clear in those advisories that this is being done because the risks created by the backdoors exceed the risks created by the additional information.

The added information will aid in debugging, clearing up the issue faster and validating that no regressions have taken place.

Now that they can extract pure silicon 28 with a simple linear accelerator (which should have been obvious), it should be possible to use much larger dies without running into imperfection problems. That doesn't keep to Moore's Law, admittedly, but it does mean you can halve the space that double the transistors would take, since you're eliminating a lot of packaging. Over the space of the motherboard, it would more than work out, especially if they moved to wafer-scale integration. Want to know how many cores they put onto a wafer using regular dies? Instead of chopping the wafer up, you throw on interconnects Transputer-style.

Graphene is troublesome, yes, but there's lots of places you need regular conductors. If you replace copper interconnects and the gold links to the pins, you should be able to reduce the heat generated and therefore increase the speed you can run the chips. Graphene might also help with 3D chip technology, as you're going to be generating less heat between the layers. That would let you double the number of transistors per unit area occupied, even if not per unit area utilized.

Gallium Arsenide is still an option. If you can sort pure isotopes then it may be possible to overcome many of the limitations that have existed so far on the technology. It has been nasty to utilize, due to pollution, but we're well into the age where you can just convert the pollution into plasma and again separate out what's in it. It might be a little expensive, but the cost of cleanup will always be more and you can sell the results from the separation. It's much harder to sell polluted mud.

In the end, because people want compute power rather than a specific transistor count, Processor-in-Memory is always an option, simply move logic into RAM and avoid having to perform those functions by going through support chips, a bus and all the layers of a CPU in order to get carried out. DDR4 is nice and all that, but main memory is still a slow part of the system and the caches on the CPU are easily flooded due to code always expanding to the space available. There is also far too much work going on in managing memory. The current Linux memory manager is probably one of the best around. Take that and all the memory support chips, put it on an oversized ASIC and give it some cache. The POWER8 processor has 96 megabytes of L3 cache. I hate odd amounts and the memory logic won't be nearly as complex as the POWER8's, so let's increase it to 128 megabytes. Since the cache will be running at close to the speed of the CPU, exhaustion and stalling won't be nearly so common.

Actually, the best thing would be for the IMF (since it's not doing anything useful with its money) to buy millions of POWER8 and MIPS64 processors, offering them for free to geeks individually on on daughter boards that can be plugged in as expansion cards. At worst, it would make life very interesting.

If data gets too slow it becomes useless. In general I like your idea (use QoS to prioritize low usage customers ahead of high usage ones) and have advocated for it before, but I'm not at all certain you'd be able to price data at $30/mo in such a scenario. The exact economics of the wireless industry are not known to any of us outside of upper level management at the carriers, but what we do know is that data is the GROWTH market. Voice isn't dying, but it's less and less important to young people, and there's a limit to how much money you could raise by tariffing it at higher rates. The carriers are looking at tens of billions of dollars of CapEx to keep pace with the growing demand for data; they're not going to find that money by inflating voice rates.

That has happened here too (Columbine being the most infamous example) but as "active shooters" have become a bigger perceived threat the training of North American law enforcement has shifted towards a more aggressive response. That's probably for the best, dead is forever, ruptured eardrums and broken doors can be repaired.

Homicide in common law jurisdictions (which includes Canada) requires the presence of mens rea, better known as intent. Can you get inside this kid's head and say that he wanted someone to die? Because that's the burden you'd need to meet to convict him of attempted homicide.

It should be a serious crime. I haven't maintained otherwise. I just questioned that it should be a ten year prison sentence level of serious. That's over the top even by American standards of jurisprudence. In New York State, assuming no prior convictions, you need a class C felony to reach that kind of sentence. For perspective, class C felonies include robbery, burglary, criminal possession of a weapon, soliciting or supporting an act of terrorism, assault on a judge or first responder, or an attempt to commit a class B felony. There's some non-violent crimes in there too, primarily fraud that reaches a certain dollar amount.

IANAL but the closest charge we would have here to fit swatting would probably be falsely reporting an incident in the third degree, which is a misdemeanor. A reading of the law would seem to support bumping it up to first degree if someone is killed as a result of the false report, which makes it a class D felony.

He's talking about domestic roaming, i.e., he's somewhere where T-Mobile doesn't have a network and is using another cellular network, most likely AT&T's. T-Mobile pays whomever he's connected to for every byte of data used and every minute of airtime. Back in the day the carriers would pass this cost along to their customers and didn't care about how much you roamed. That went out of vogue in the early 2000s, with the advent of so-called "nationwide" plans, and they started eating the cost in favor of providing a simpler experience for their customers.

Most every American cell company limits the amount you can roam, either with an explicit policy like T-Mobile (you only get 100MB and then we shut you off) or a "soft cap" in the Terms of Service. The ones that limit via TOS typically have language saying something like, "If more than 50% of your usage for three consecutive billing cycles is on partner networks we reserve the right to terminate your service." The exception to this rule is Verizon; they've never cared about how much of your usage is domestic roaming. They make far more money from all those regional carriers whose customers roam on the Verizon network than they pay them for the handful of Verizon customers that venture into their service areas.

There's a limit to how far "What might have been" goes in the criminal justice system. If you text while driving you might kill someone. That doesn't argue in favor of giving every distracted driver a sentence equivalent to what you'd get for manslaughter.

I don't know the particulars of this case but as a general rule of thumb I would not be willing to throw in the towel on a 17 year old. The ostensible point of the criminal justice system is rehabilitation. That's the case even in the United States, which is probably the harshest Western country when it comes to criminal justice.

I don't think that's really at play here. Let's play devil's advocate and pretend the SWAT team had never been developed; now call the police and tell them that someone is in the process of murdering your neighbor. What do you suppose happens? They come to your neighbor's house with firearms drawn and immediately force entry into his home. They won't have all of the expensive tactical gear but do you think that's really going to alter the "experience" for your neighbor by any appreciable degree? Do you think there's much difference between looking at the business end of a .38 Special vs. an AR-15?

The militarization of the police is a worrisome trend that I've discussed before but I don't think it has anything to do with swatting. If the police think that someone is in the process of being murdered they're going to respond quickly and aggressively. There's really no good solution here; I don't think you want the police to discount such reports.

You've mellowed but you think someone should forfeit 10 years of their life for essentially being an immature teenaged brat? That's roughly the amount of time you can expect to spend in prison for murder in Finland. I guess that's the difference between viewing imprisonment as a correction vs. a punishment. I wouldn't think the little turd should get a slap on the wrist but ten years seems a bit harsh unless there's some extenuating circumstance (someone died or was permanently disfigured) I don't know about. Isn't the objective to make the offender a productive member of society rather than a professional criminal?

Your carrier's billing system will never agree with what's collected on your phone. They'll typically see more sent on the downstream (tower -> phone) than your device because of retransmissions of packets your phone never received. Likewise, they'll see less on the upstream (phone -> tower) for the same reason. They can't bill you for a failed packet on the upstream but your phone will still count it.

In the real world the difference isn't statistically significant; Verizon usually agrees with my phone to within 1%. It's just something to be mindful of when you're getting close to your cap or if you're roaming and paying those rates.