Since SDXC cards go up to 2TB and record 4K at consumer bitrates I don't see any reason for a new standard for years and even if one was needed it doesn't matter one bit to Google's data mining and most likely all it'd do is make phones with SD cards $2 cheaper so there's no money in it either. Sure denying Microsoft revenue would be nice but Microsoft already has a fat wallet, Google mainly wants to keep them out of their product space.

Teens who want to get laid. Like it or not, cell phones and social media has taken over a lot of the real-world interaction we used to have as teens. Mainly because I didn't have a cell phone until my late teens, much less a camera phone and nothing like social media. A lot of the flirting and teasing that used to happen in dark corners at parties is now happening through texting and sexting online. Not to mention the upkeep of an ongoing relationship, if you wanted to get more graphical than you'd say over a fixed phone line in the hallway you had to hook up in person. Today you're more expected to keep it up all the time, even if you're apart which means sending naughties on Snapchat and such. Yes, sometimes it backfires badly but people in love won't believe their love will stab them in the back. And while I'm pulling this statistic out of my ass, I think most personal photos most of the time aren't shared with anyone but the intended recipient and aren't abused. And I think that still holds true even though these 200k pics leaked.

Not to mention that it was a lot more obvious who was copying and who was not. Ever hear the expression "yesterday's news"? Well that was whatever they read in a competitor's paper yesterday and printed as news today. Today I'm sure they all have watcher services on each other, for every article posted they have someone evaluate whether they can run a copycat article. And I don't mean that in terms of copyright infringement, but just knowing that some event happened and is newsworthy they can write their own, non-infringing article using much the same sources. Today that might mean that one online site is 5-10 minutes behind the original source instead of a day, most people don't even notice who broke the news. Like today pretty much all our services covered the hit-n-run of a cyclist that died. I'm sure someone was first but it's not exclusive and they can all use the same source so they don't have to cite anyone. I suppose investigative journalism is still valuable, but "discovering" journalism has lost a lot of value.

That makes as much sense as saying Intel should provide a magic generic driver so it can run ARM software. nVidia, AMD and Intel all have different hardware implementations, the only thing most people care about is high level DirectX/OpenGL support which is the equivalent of Java on the CPU side. You have an expected functionality but how it's actually implemented in assembler differs from hardware to hardware. To be fair, there is a "thinnest possible overlay" created with Gallium3D which is something like what you ask for. Basically it's something like C for graphics card, one unified interface for shaders. As I understand it in theory the community could create support for OpenGL 4.5 and hardware accelerate it on AMD and Intel chips given the information that's available now. But the open source drivers are ~4 years behind the state of the art at OpenGL 3.3. And that's just for support, the closed source drivers go through tons of optimization for popular games so in practice they're way further behind on performance parity. Why don't they give it away? Competition mainly, just like AMD with Catalyst. Why give Intel a free optimized driver way more advanced than their current one?

I think I'll have to invoke Godwin on this one or for that matter post 9/11 US, education doesn't stop wacky wars. At least not education with a high degree of political slant and indoctrination, people can read/write or for that matter be an engineer/developer and still swallow political propaganda hook, line and sinker.

This is far older and simpler than this, it's opposition to equality of the sexes. They'd rather have their women be ignorant half-slave housekeepers, sex servants, child bearers and nannies. The first step is denying them any education so they're illiterate, then wrap them in burqas and make them terrified of contact with any other male who might treat them like a human being and finally subjugate them in law, to refuse your husband is never rape, no divorce, the kids belong to the father and if a woman gets raped let's punish her because obviously she tempted them in some way.

And just to get back on that education track, if the choices are no education, religious indoctrination (ev-uh-lution? what's that?) or government indoctrination I think for the most part I favor democratically imposed standards of education over individual whack jobs who want to inflict their wacky world view on their children. Not that I think public school is necessarily a good school, but most of them are pretty bland and expose you to a wide variety of other children with different backgrounds.

Put up or shut up!

Just remember that a lot of that is due to economic efficiency, not because the resources aren't available locally or because there weren't other material choices or simpler technology that would have gotten the job done. You don't need to ship 14nm CPU process technology, if you could replicate the 3200nm, ~20k transistor technology of 1978 you'd have an 8086 chip that is still a decade more advanced technology than what got us to the moon. Instead of neodymium you could probably use a gas laser or iron magnet for most applications, using only common elements. When we look at how we could build a Mars outpost using our most advanced technology and materials it's from our perspective here on Earth where the sourcing and manufacturing is cheap and easily available while the delivery is extremely expensive. If you flip that around to say what's the lowest tech, most easily sourced and versatile alternative they could do locally it might turn out that the must-have part of our tech tree isn't that big after all.

...and faster broadband than New York City. How's that no true Scotsman fallacy working for you?

Most likely not, since you have to have some sort of official diplomatic or consular function which means you can't go undercover. It's more that both sides do it and cracking down hard on foreign spies will be very bad for your own assets.

Not as long as you can disable it or set your own signatures, what TPM gives you is a chain of trust but unless your entire system enforces it where the TPM will only load a signed BIOS, the BIOS will only load a signed OS, the OS will only load signed drivers and you don't need it for remote attestation or some other proof you're running a DRM-compliant system you can just turn it off and run the hardware with any hacked up driver you want. And making a graphics card that will only work with particular unmodified signed distros where you can't compile your own kernel is a total non-starter.

Windows 95 would work fine: 4MB RAM (8MB recommended) so the RAM is overkill, ~50MB disk space so you could squeeze it in by omitting a few optional bits, VGA display so you really want 640x480 not 320x480 but it'd probably be OK, and the CPU is about as much overkill as the RAM. It had networking, a browser, everything but the touch-screen interface for which you'd need a third-party add-on. Or Windows for Pen Computing, a modified Windows 3.1.

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Well, the 43%-50% guarantee price is for Tesla Financing, which is not actually a lease. It's a 60-90% loan financed purchase with a buyback guarantee from Tesla where you may sell it back after 3 years, you must exercise that option within 3 months or the offer is no longer valid. So in that case, it's a lease-like arrangement with an actual purchase back price. Apparently they also have a real lease program, under financing there's three options with cash being the third of course. I don't think many will use that option though, 50-60% value loss in three years seems very high so I think it's mainly just a safety net for early adopters worried the second hand price will fall like a stone.

Realistic, but very hard to learn from since it'll all be one-time events. I suspect what they want is repeatable "randomness" so more like scripted cars where you can tweak the algorithms, reset the scenario and try again. Not to mention that if you're intentionally trying to break the computer's algorithms, having actual people in the mix seems like a bad idea. Having people drive cars around like they do with drones could be a good compromise though.

Both Qatar and us here in Norway have oil, basically we won the natural resource lottery which is rather independent of any political system. Try Sweden or Denmark if you want more fair examples of social democratic countries. In any case, we're part of EUs inner market so there's not really many import tariffs but we do have a large public sector, many things are paid for by taxes and provided as public services.

Actually less and less people live in extreme poverty, world literacy rates are going up, agricultural jobs are replaced by industry and service jobs that require skilled labor. Almost half the remaining extremely poor live in India and China, both countries that are rapidly pulling themselves out of poverty. The financial crisis that has hit the west hasn't really stopped progress on that. The greatest challenges are still in Africa where the numbers are going backwards due to population growth, but with pretty much all of Asia moving in the right direction the total picture is more good than bad.