your constitutional right to a trial. They make you agree to binding arbitration instead. (Section 10 of the EULA).

That one really burns me. It's pretty unAmerican to say "Give up a constitutional right or you can't use our product." (Was that there before?)

How can this be legal? There's got to be a way around that. I have no intentions of ever suing Microsoft, but this rubs me the wrong way. What's next, you have to give up your right to freedom of speech?

Um, no, the default is "Express Settings" which enables all that spyful telemetry by default. Most people are going to go with that. I turned it all off except for crash reporting.

That's a protocol design bug.

Specifically, there's actually no reason that protocol traffic wouldn't include a "this is my idea of the current time" in the requests and responses so that delta times could be locally calculated from the packet contents on the receiving end. This would work, no problem, for a protocol like NFS.

Kerberos is more of an issue, but since all parties have to trust the ticket granting system as the trusted third party -- so you might a well trust their timestamp as well, since you've already established a trust chain dependency on the third party. You mode the protocol to send the timestamp within the security association, and you are golden (regardless of whether you are running an adjusted or monotonic clock).

This is how DCE RPC handles byte order: receiver translates to local byte order -- if the byte order is different. If it's not, then there's no need for translation, and it saves CPU on both ends of the connection. Receiver translates to a delta time from which the timestamps are derived, and timesync is no longer a problem.

In my experience, this tends to happen when marketing gets involved in the design process, and starts asking for previous_product++. One of the reasons Steve Jobs was so effective is that he understood the technical side of things well enough to help make design decisions.

The best way to get good at estimating is doing a couple of fixed price contracts that end up working out to you making less than minimum wage. Then you either get good at estimating, or you go out of business.

All managers who've worked with people who are bad at estimating automatically apply a scaling factor, which usually depends on the person making the estimate, and then you scale it for the real estimate, because people are frequently bad at estimating. In general, there are two types of people (substitute gender, if you wish to): Mr. Right, and Mr. Right Now. Both of these can be valuable to a company, but generally, if you want to scale to a large number of customers without huge built-in costs, your prototype is done by Mr. Right Now to get to funding, and then your released product is done by Mr. Right.

The oldest continuously running company is Kongo Gumi; it was founded in the year 578. Not dead yet.

FWIW, there are 5,586 companies older than 200 years. Like the Stiftskeller St. Peter restaurant in Austria, which was founded in the year 803, or Sean's Bar, an Irish Pub, founded in the year 900. Even the U.S. has gotten into the act; Shirley Plantation is a farm founded in Virginia in 1613. A surprising percentage of them are alcohol related, although there are also a lot of hotels, confectioners, and other businesses.

The cooler thing would be if you have enough high speed printing capacity that you could manufacture and assemble a 1000 drone swarm in a very short period of time and overwhelm an adversaries defenses without requiring a ship big enough to carry a 1000 completed drones. And then another one, and another one. You would need a tanker full of plastic and a freighter full of batteries, electronics and propellers.

âoeKill decisionâ baby.

The browser UI is new, but the rendering engine is still based on Trident. They just removed all the legacy stuff, and focused on clean implementations of the standards without worrying so much about backward compatibility. Edge will puke about as badly as Chrome or Firefox will if fed code and markup intended for IE7, instead of falling back to IE7's rendering style.

Which isn't to say there aren't going to be security bugs, of course. But then, the same is true of all the big browser vendors.

Yep. Those kinds of experiments get expensive, though. There are only a few systems in the world sensitive enough to reliably (i.e. without risk of error from outside sources) detect thrust on the levels we're talking about, even at 10x the power of the current experiments. Another problem is that they need to cool the thing. It sounds counterintuitive, but cooling stuff in a vacuum (such as they are using for the current rounds of testing, to eliminate the risk of errors due to things like convection currents) is hard. That makes it difficult to run a high-power magnetron.

Possibly. I don't actually know anything about quantum virtual particles except what I've read related to the theories on how the EM Drive might work. I've got a BS in computer engineering, not a PhD in physics. I can believe that Hawking could have shown that, but I don't know if it has or has not been shown.

Empirical observations trump theory. Theory is an attempt to explain how the universe works, but it does not dictate the universe's workings. Grad-level physics can explain why the EM Drive shouldn't work. Newtonian physics can explain why GPS shouldn't work, too; and yet the accuracy of the results remain as high as ever.

The problem is, according to everybody who has tested it, the EM Drive does produce thrust. When your theory contradicts reality, it is the theory which is discarded (or at least updated). Unless there's some pervasive experimental error in all of the independent observations of this effect - which is possible, but becomes less likely with each successful reproduction - that will need to happen with our understanding of those grad-level physics you studied.

In that case, on your final, you did the equivalent of computing that if a 1kg object (constant mass, initially at rest relative to you) produces 10^8 N of thrust in a straight line away from you for six seconds, it'll be going at just over twice the speed of light relative to you afterwards. Perfectly consistent with physics as it was near-universally understood until 110 years ago...

Of course, in this case, we have an experimental result before we have a fully consistent theory to explain it. In a reversal from the way much (though not all) recent physics progress has been made, the empiricists appear to be outracing the theorists. That's why right now there are a number of hypotheses, each of which have problems. More experiments will allow us to refine those hypotheses and throw out those which are shown to be incorrect (for example, Guido Fetta - of the Cannae Drive - had a theory that radial slots inside the drive's chamber were required; NASA demonstrated that they weren't). More time will also allow theoretical physicists to work out the underpinnings of how this happens. That will expand our understanding of the universe, give us the tools to predict future experimental results (rather than trying to explain the result after the fact), and open new branches of scientific exploration.

The above paragraph is, of course, predicated on the assumption that the effect does happen. I'm not discarding the possibility of experimental error at this point. It is simply becoming less and less plausible of an explanation.

First of all, a horse cannot continuously accelerate given a constant amount of electricity (or even hay). Horses need to push against something (the ground) and can only do that so fast; there is a cap on their maximum velocity. In practice, for any given real-world flywheel and generator, there would be a max speed for an EM Drive-driven rotor too - due to centrifugal force, if nothing else - but there's no theoretical maximum that I'm aware of.

Read david_thornley's comment above for the math. The basic idea is that if you have something which increases its velocity at a constant rate and for constant energy, then its kinetic energy growth will eventually exceed the energy driving it. That's because kinetic energy grows as the square of velocity.

Of course, a conventional rocket could accelerate continuously (unlike a horse) if you could keep it supplied with fuel. That's the big "if", though; the total energy you could get out of it is never more than the rest energy of the fuel you put in. Imagine a total-conversion antimatter rocket, which is probably the most efficient kind of reaction drive possible (since you are literally extracting all the energy possible from a given mass). It produces an incredible amount of energy for the fuel you put in... but at the end of the day, it runs out of fuel (stops accelerating) and you have to put more in, consuming the mass/energy of something from outside the system. It can't run forever without consuming an infinite amount of mass.

The EM Drive has no fuel requirement at all. Electricity isn't a thing that can be consumed, it's a process, the motion of electrons. A generator can keep applying (electromotive) force to those electrons, keeping them moving forever as long as there's an energy input to the generator itself. The EM Drive can keep producing thrust as long as it has electricity. Once you reach the break-even point, no outside mass/energy is required.

I would mostly agree with parent. Soylent is fine execpt the community isnt big enough so the comments are barely there or worth reading, the name is kind of bad and the stories are routinely just old enough to be yesterdays news on Slashdot or Hacker news.

Their Twitter feed, which is where I get my news feeds, also puts these really annoying lame "from the deptâ attempts at humor in the tweets instead of just the title of the story and the link:

Razer Acquires Ouya Software Assets, Ditches Hardware from the kicked-down dept

They will even thorten the title to make room for the utterly stupid âoefrom theâ.

The best solution to replace Slashdot would probably be if Hacker news grafted the classic Slashdot look, commenting and moderation system on to their generally good stories and great community.

There is a high probably no Sunday talk show would have let him speak once they found out what he was going to say. They are all owned by giant media conglomerates you know. They wouldnt risk the wrath of the Federal government. Pretty sure Snowden went to Greenwald because he was one of the few journalists with the balls to do the story. The Guardian was hammered by the UK government for running it.

Remember when the CEO of Qwest defied the NSA plan to tap all data and phones lines after 9/11. The Federal government pulled all their contracts from Qwest, hammered their stock and then put him in prison for a phony securities rap. Qwest was a rare corporate hero among telecoms, long since swallowed up by CenturyLink who are just as bad as all the rest.

Agree 100%.

The definition of "conspiracy" is: two or more people hiding their actions from one or more other people. (Like: surprise party; or, the mafia.)

Thus, if the government "classifies" something, it is a conspiracy by definition! They (one or more people) are hiding their actions from the public (one or more people).

So it's no stretch to say government conspires. Does government classify? Yes. Thus, government conspires.