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Comment Re:But can we believe them? (Score 1) 99

there is zero chance they could recover the cost from GCHQ

Interesting thought: we normally regard investor-state dispute settlement clauses negatively, but this is an actual case where they would be helpful in compensating Gemalto for the harm caused to them. Requiring the NSA, etc. to pay compensation for the harm caused could do a lot to curtail their actions.

Comment Re:Battery life (Score 1) 141

Yes, an individual render operation is always going to be more expensive. But it's not necessary to always update the screen - given that watches are usually held in a specific orientation when being read, you could easily reduce power consumption by an order of magnitude if you only rendered the time when it was actually being read. There's also the possibility of drawing power from the wearer's movement, similar to an automatic.

Comment Re:Non-readers love "real books" (Score 1) 261

A librarian that does not value paper. That is like a cardiovascular surgeon that eats a pound of bacon every day.

Librarians value knowledge, not paper; the paper is just a medium. Also, saturated fat isn't bad for your heart (in fact the evidence is leaning towards it being good for your HDL/LDL ratio), and bacon is actually a common occurrence in low carb breakfasts.

I want my children and grandchildren to have the books I purchased and read. Those digital formats will be gone in just a few years while I have books older than my country.

PDF and ePUB aren't going anywhere. There's a distinction to be made between ebooks and DRM, in much the same way as there is between digital music (MP3, AAC, etc.) and DRM.

Comment Re:Not Censorship (Score 1) 285

Most people want some forms of censorship, if only for the simple matter of organizing your content.

That's not censorship, that's filtering. The difference is that filtering allows the user to control what they view, while censorship places that control in the hands of the publisher.

I personally would like to see more changes like this because not everyone on the internet can discern between what they click on...

Blogger already had warning pages appear for adult blogs which had to be dismissed before the user could view the content. Those were sufficient to prevent anyone from viewing content they didn't want to, (and nothing short of constant vigilance is going to stop a kid from viewing content they're interested in.)

All this does is force active adult blogs to migrate to other sites, and take a bunch of inactive ones offline (unless the Internet Archive archives them before then).

Comment Re:Operating at 20W gives zero improvement. (Score 1) 114

Then surprise surprise AMD chips trade blows with chips costing more than twice as much [youtube.com] with several tests the AMD outright smoking and in others within a couple percentage points of the i5s.

The issue is that the damage is done; AMD hasn't updated their CPU lineup recently. The FX-8350 was originally released in late 2012 and still seems to be the best option from their FX series. (The FX-8370 is just a nicer binning, and the FX-9xxx appear to be ridiculously overclocked, with almost twice the TDP.) I'm planning to upgrade my PC later this year, but buying a 3 year old CPU just seems insane. In contrast, Haswell processors are barely a year old, and a Haswell i5 delivers comparable performance.

Meanwhile, AMD's APU lines max out at 4 cores, which is a step backwards from my Phenom II hex core, and the APU offers little advantage given that I'd be getting a discrete graphics card anyway. (The main workload for this system is compilation, so believe me when I say that the no. of cores absolutely does matter.)

I'm the sort of person who should be a shoe-in for AMD's high end, but I can't even tell if the FX line is obsolete or not. I think that says a lot about their execution.

Comment Re:Lawyers rejoice!! (Score 1) 114

They shouldn't just be hit via a class action suit (assuming Lenovo isn't sticking a "binding arbitration" clause to defeat the ability for consumers to seek recourse) but Federal prosecution under one of the many computer security laws that would string up anyone else.

Honest question: is putting a backdoor/vulnerability into a product actually a crime in the US? As I understand it, most of the computer security laws are about actively breaking in ("gaining access"). The closest I can think of are contractual issues with sale ("fitness for purpose") and negligence, but both of those are civil.

Comment Re:Lawyers rejoice!! (Score 1) 114

I have a feeling this is less about recovering from damages and more about teaching them a formal lesson (well, cashing-in under the guise of teaching them a formal lesson).

That's the entire point of a class action suit. To stop powerful companies from doing a large number of small harms and getting away with it.

Ironically, awarding damages on an individual basis to the claimants would be far more punitive than whatever damages are awarded.

Comment Re:Single Quote? (Score 1) 264

There hasn't, but I wouldn't expect it to matter. I don't believe the name is actually used anywhere (everyone just uses the version number), and its only defined in a makefile that's part of the kernel git repo. I'm not even sure if there's a rule for when it should be changed - I suspect it's merely whenever Linus feels like it.

Comment Re:probably won't go anywhere (Score 1) 161

For example, for the CPU it's common that I have more RAM than I can access at any one time at top speed.

No, no it isn't, and it hasn't been since the Amiga.

There is no PC where it is common to have different speeds of memory.

Maybe not on desktops, but it definitely exists in servers, where it's referred to as NUMA.

Comment Re:Actually (Score 1) 532

The actual evidence is a little more mixed. From Wikipedia:

Most studies support a link between adult criminality and testosterone, although the relationship is modest if examined separately for each sex. Nearly all studies of juvenile delinquency and testosterone are not significant. Most studies have also found testosterone to be associated with behaviors or personality traits linked with criminality such as antisocial behavior and alcoholism. Many studies have also been done on the relationship between more general aggressive behavior/feelings and testosterone. About half the studies have found a relationship and about half no relationship.[72] ...

It has been empirically shown that boys who had a history of high physical aggression, from age 6 to 12, were found to have lower testosterone levels at age 13 compared with boys with no history of high physical aggression. The former were also failing in school and were unpopular with their peers. Both concurrent and longitudinal analyses indicate that testosterone levels were positively associated with social success rather than with physical aggression.[76]

-- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...

So, testosterone may be linked to antisocial behaviour, alcoholism and/or social success (in minors), but the jury is still out on aggression.

Comment Re:TrueCrypt is not open source software. (Score 1) 112

As a result of its questionable status with regard to copyright restrictions and other potential legal issues, the TrueCrypt License is not considered "free" by several major Linux distributions and is therefore not included in Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, openSUSE, or Gentoo.

While this is true of the others, it is not true of Gentoo. Gentoo's policy seems to be that while the base system should not depend on non-FOSS components, having them present in the main tree is fine. (This might be partly because it's pretty easy to filter which licenses you want on your system using ACCEPT_LICENSE.)

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