This all makes sense and is probably a good idea.

That said, despite school having literally been decades ago, I find myself empathizing with the kids on this one, who I'm sure arn't seeing this as an investment in their future but rather yet more time spent in the dungeon. I didn't exactly hate school growing up, but damn if I wasn't ready to get the hell outa there when the bell rang.

Maybe it's because we just had Christmas and that always puts me in a nostalgic child like mood. I'm sure if they announced this in September when school is just getting back into session and screwing up my morning commute I'd say to hell with the kids, but for now, the kid in me say: BOOOO!

Doubting the official line on the Sony hack is hardly the stuff of tinfoil-hat denialism. How's this for a scenario: (1) Garden-variety haxx0rz and/or a disgruntled employee steal a bunch of embarrassing files from Sony -- plenty of motive there -- and dump the files on the web. (2) Some moron in the media starts speculating that it has something to do with an idiotic movie about North Korea, and the echo chamber amplifies it as truth. (3) Haxx0rz, sensing an epic opportunity for lulz, play along with the feeding frenzy in the media with some crazy threats against screening the movie, then sit back and watch the fun as paranoia in the FBI and mindless nationalism in the population do the rest of their work for them.

Couldn't be.

In a country where the internet is about as commonplace as for us having your own rocket launch system in the backyard? Please. How do you hit NKor via internet? Take down their online payment system? Hack their official pages so their citizens would get to see defaced pics of li'l Kim?

How?

I can see that as an offensive force, but defense? Please.

Software patents are utter bullshit from word one. They should just go away and stay away.

Hardware patents are something else, but it's pretty clear they are being *very* poorly managed. I don't even like saying it, but I'm afraid I agree with you: they do more harm than good now.

We need an entirely new model of encouraging invention. Trade secret is useful in providing a reasonable profit window and establishment of precedence in the marketplace (the only way to go with software, as far as I'm concerned) as the window you get correlates well with the complexity of what you've done, but has its limits when we're talking hardware.

Perhaps a way for society to pay for an invention, and once that's been done, it goes right into the "available to everyone" pool. Panels of experts setting perceived value and an immediate payment being made, followed by a revisit ten years later to determine how it all went, with extra reward possible if the invention's impact was underestimated?

Look at me, suggesting government committees. Oy. I should go bang my head on a table.

But damn, we *really* need to clean out the drains. Patents are the disgusting glop that are making the system run slower and slower, while getting legal sewage all over everyone involved. The only consistent winners here are the plumbers (lawyers.)

FTFP. "We induce errors in most DRAM modules (110 out of 129) from three major DRAM manufacturers."

Short version, leakage current from adjacent gates can nudge other to bit-flip. I don't think this is a manufacturing problem as it is a fundamental EE design oversight. So yeah, defective by design (unintentionally)!!

That's how Chip and PIN works. Your account number is still fixed, but your authorization to spend from it (your PIN) is encrypted by the chip, and is valid only for a single transaction. There are still kinks with non-electronic transactions, but those can be solved.

Look for it to be all over the US by October of next year.

Thank you. I don't know why so much of Slashdot seems to be taking the obvious "it was NK omg" story at face value, even after NK explicitly denied it. They take credit for things they've never done - if they'd hacked Sony successfully, of course they'd be bragging about it.

Perhaps. That is certainly a valid concern. However, the state of the art in this area is continually advancing very quickly. Just having an advanced fab in China does not mean that Chinese engineers are able to create the next generation chips and fabs. I think Intel's move is quite logical, and the danger of intellectual property theft not too serious in their case.

In other news: A company so desperate to get into bed with Apple signs away their soul for rainbows and promises.

Actually the opposite is the case. Our economy has exactly the opposite, but nonetheless equally destructive, problem communism had: They had a shortage of supply. We have a shortage of demand.

Our economy produces enough. Proof? Go anywhere and behold how desperately everyone wants to sell. Be it goods or services, You'll be hard pressed to NOT find someone offering whatever you may want to you. What's lacking is the demand. And without it, there is no market either.

If you think people need any kind of incentive to be ravenous asshole capitalists, think again. Those that could invest already want to. Quite badly, too. There just isn't anything to invest in, because there is no viable business possible without consumers that would want to buy what you'd offer. And the main reason for this is simply that there are not enough people who have enough money to become consumers. And jobs are sadly not created when someone wills a business into existence. Well, you can do that, but it's not really viable to produce without a chance to sell what you produce. You'll be bankrupt in no time.

A job is created when the market situation of demand forces the supply side into hiring additional personnel to fill that demand. Nobody in their sane mind creates a job for the sake of creating a job, paying another person and putting more goods he can't sell on the stockpile. If this is the situation (and that is the situation currently), the sane option is NOT to hire someone and NOT to produce more of what you can't already sell.

It's not about countries, it's about cultures.
Some cultures (e.g. Western European culture) favor more serious subjects versus others. Some others (e.g. Northern American) favor lighter subjects (unwind-type). Asian cultures apparently favor explosive feeling-related and augmentative headlines ("It's SUPER effective!"; "AMAZING performance!").

Nobody's to blame, really, except companies not doing their homeworks and trying to vomit their own culture-specific successes over other cultures and promptly failing.

did this take so long to occur. It amazes me both that people fall for this, and that the credit card companies allow these services to operate under merchant accounts.

It tends to be; but I think regulatory authorities only get nervous if it shows signs of being dangerously effective, or if there is reason to believe that the pockets behind it are deep enough to ignore losses almost indefinitely(as with international dumping/tariff slapfights, where a mixture of xenophobia and the fact that a nation state can typically afford to keep dumping longer than a company can afford to keep competing).

In the case of Intel trying to break into tablets, my understanding is that it's a known matter of fact that Bay Trail parts are being practically given away(along with a nontrivial amount of Intel software work, including an emulator to handle ARM NDK stuff and general porting and polishing to make the x86 Android not look like, say, the blasted hellscape that is MIPS Android); but it is less clear whether Intel has been able to dump hard enough to actually damage competition.

The one product line that they definitely helped bury was Windows RT (which was mostly an unloved bastard child anyway, even before you could cram an x86 into the same chassis, and definitely had no reason to exist afterwards); but that didn't hurt MS much, since the quality of Windows tablets went up. In the wider ARM ecosystem, ARM Ltd, themselves seem to be riding high and unbelievably cheap SoCs continue to pop out of the woodwork.

Their Bay Trail pricing has definitely made x86 Android something you might actually see in the wild, and tablet-Windows something you might actually consider at a sub-Windows Surface price point; but it doesn't seem to have crushed the ARM market very much.