Just to add, that the event driven thing makes a difference where you're doing lots of small transactions - in that case, you can support thousands of incoming requests with just one process using a relatively small amount of RAM. You can really make it fly by locking it to a CPU core and giving it real-time priority. If you expand that out to all but one of your system's cores, then assuming you have the ram, one box can serve nearly everyone on the planet, just so long as no one asks for anything too complicated. That's a pretty specialised use-case, which very few of us really need to think about.

However, as you say, almost no one really needs to squeeze the last few percent of performance out of any web app they're running. Your boss might complain about the cost of another server, but it's easily manageable in the grand scheme of things. That being the case, having a slightly inefficient stack, and some occasional cross-core IPC, in exchange for keeping your systems pretty close to vanilla, and keeping your code, testing and deployments super-simple makes a lot of sense.

Absolutely.

Samsung just can't write software. Every piece of software they're responsible for has a problem one way or another (or at least all the ones I've ever seen - and I've got a Samsung phone or two, so I've seen a lot). Their hardware is generally good, so they should stick to doing that and let the rest of us take over their software. Hell, if they had the whole of their "smart" features in a sort of plug-in box, then they could invite other 'partners' to make entirely new TVs out of their base hardware - that would be awesome for us consumers and it would mitigate the utter shitness of their own software.

If in doubt, unplug the TV - all the smart bollocks you've paid for are now useless, but at least you're safe.

I know you're A/C and so have a lower bar of thinking to reach than the rest of us, but it amazes me that you can't see the problem here.

You live in a neighbourhood, that presumably you chose and like. You presumably know your neighbours, at least vaguely. This TV (with the feature enabled, and if it's buggy, without the feature enabled) means you're now living in some shithole backwater in Elbonia where some geeks are using what you say for nefarious purposes. You're also living next door to the NSA, GCHQ, whomever the KGB turned into, and countless others - in fact, you have no way of ever knowing who you "neighbours" are.

Not interstella, but the Voyagers were able to do what they did because "the planets aligned" to allow for lots of slingshots. You could argue mankind waited a few millennia for that specific situation before launching those probes...

Repeating the exercise either takes some supremely advanced technology, lots of additional effort, lots of time, or possibly waiting the however-many-years until it happens again.

This time around though, Microsoft has a warehouse or two full of Surface 1s to 'dump'. A quick firmware change, and poof! 'budget' Windows tablet for the masses.

I recently put my blog on the .onion. You can get to it via the "normal web" via it's .com address, via google searches and whatnot, or you can use a .onion address to get the same stuff. I have to say, it was pathetically simple to set up, and I encourage everyone with a server of their own to do the same. Feel free to upgrade to a Tor relay if you have bandwidth too.

You may well ask what's the point? Well, my motivation was to see how easy it was, and to increase the amount of content available on the .onion network. I'm pretty sure the only people who've ever visited it are me and one friend of mine, but the fact there's another IP on the internet talking to Tor nodes, and the fact that on very rare occasions those Tor nodes talk back to it makes me feel good.

If ever I have too much spare time, maybe I'll make a search engine for .onion addresses...? ;-)

Back on topic: the Silk Road had a restrictions policy (albeit an inconsistent one), but other people have no such qualms. The authorities have succeeded in one sense in that they've fragmented the market, they've also put some additional risk onto the purchaser because it's now less clear how legit the site or vendor are. However, they've enabled someone looking for something minor like a bit of weed to also find all manner of other things. I'm sure someone looking for an RPG would have found one with or without the SR, but someone looking for weed might start thinking "I could also buy an RPG", where they might not have done before. In that sense, shutting down SR was a failure.

Ultimately, if there's a demand, there'll be supply. Shutting down websites of any kind doesn't alter demand very much, and so there'll always be supply. If the authorities wanted to do anything about this, they'd spend more time working on the demand side of the problem. Sadly, that doesn't have instant results, doesn't get headlines and for every success it has there's a notable failure too.

Does that imply there's a problem with the image processing then? I mean, if a high res sensor gets 100% red on one pixel, and 50% red on the ones surrounding it, should the image processor actually puff up the surrounding pixels to (say) 75%? My thinking being that the blob of light that got to the central pixel was partly lost in the gaps between pixels, so the ones surrounding it don't fully represent what was actually hitting the sensor.

As much as I agree that this case seems to have lots of holes in it, running a marketplace is not 'common carrier'. The important distinction is that a common carrier is paid to provide a 'connection' service, after which you can do anything you like with it. A marketplace connects a buyer to a seller, handles the money, and takes a fee for that introduction. Thus, the marketplace has to know what is being sold and whom the buyer and seller are, and further more collects the money from the buyer and gives it to the seller.

Had the Silk Road been more like a chat room, then there'd be many more parallels with the 'common carrier'. If Silk Road had provided the place to advertise goods and to connect buyers to the sellers, but otherwise kept out of any transactions, it's possible the 'common carrier' thing might work. However, as soon as SR started handling the money, it became part of the transaction, and so became implicated. As I understand it, the goods and services didn't have 'code names', so there's no way DPR could claim he thought he'd just brokered a 'cleaning' service for someone's apartment - so no 'reasonable doubt' there either.

Everyone knows real hitmen call themselves 'cleaners'.

It's okay, I'm sure tourists from all over the world will literally flock to Jeddah to have a look at the world from that high up. Oh wait... it's Saudi which doesn't do tourist visas... maybe not then.

We'll have the space elevator, just as soon as we find someone who's a bit too rich with a dick that's a bit too small that wants to build a monument to themselves.

Let's say I hire a PI to follow you around and take photos of everything you do in public, and perhaps through the windows of your house, maybe using a laser microphone to listen to what you say in your house, and make notes of everything you do. At no time will you be physically obstructed by any of this. Do you honestly not feel that impinges on your freedom at all?

Amazing.

I've been using Pico CMS recently as an experiment. It too seems pretty nice.

I saw an ad at the station for some company doing personality tests to 'unlock your potential'. That reminded me that I did a bunch of these at the start of my teens at school, primarily as a means to determine the sorts of jobs you might want to look into. I answered those tests in good faith, I wasn't trying to game them, and yet, without exception, they came out as "inconclusive", with no career suggestions at all (I wonder if they refund the test fee for that!?). I sure hope they've improved since then, because they were no use to back then.

...and when the probe sent in my name crashes into said object (deliberately, or due to decaying orbit), I'd prefer that the object in question was contaminated by it as little as possible such that any future missions could look at it in it's original form.