How is it possible that copyright not only keeps being extended to prevent works of corporations from entering the public domain, but now other laws start stripping rights of the public for their own works for the benefit of corporations?

LiFePO4.

Cliffhangers in the summary now?

That's not what I've found. Apple discontinued support for iPad 1 less than 2 years after releasing it, meaning no iOS6 update, after disclosing 197 security vulnerabilities fixed as part of the iOS6 release.

This tells me one thing: If you want something safe that's going to last you more than a couple of years, don't buy an iPad.

Summary suggests Windows RT is not the device for a lot of folks ;)

Nevermind who Windows is "good for", let's look at what Windows has going for it:

1 - A ton of users familiar with its desktop UI
2 - The mother-load of desktop software
3 - A ton of games compiled for native x86/x64
4 - Office

With Windows RT Microsoft basically said "Screw #1. Screw #2. Screw #3." That leaves a tablet for .. people who want to use Office on.. a tablet? Oh and they also added Metro. Except that the market for portable devices is already full of app platforms that are far more established.

Why would you buy a Windows RT tablet? Beats me. Clearly someone thought they could toss their core value propositions but win in the app space because... because something?

Even forgoing "backwards compatibility" with x86 apps, maybe, maybe if you could actually compile desktop applications for it it would be a slightly more attractive platform, but being stuck with nothing but Office and what's available in Metro? It just isn't going to live up to many buyers desires or expectations.

Seems Blender's Cycles renderer is still having problems with AMD GPUs, and I see the finger pointed in AMD's direction. It would be nice to have some more hardware choices, but NVIDIA seems to be the only options at this point in time.

.. which patents MPEG LA were claiming to be essential?

But you're missing the point. To maximize the benefit of the cache the stuff that's accessed most should be in the cache, whether it is the pagefile or something else. Otherwise, when your game is running and Windows is hitting the frequently accessed part of the page file, your game will run slow. Likewise, what is the point in putting 8GB of your game into the cache if only 5% of it is accessed frequently? Not only is that poor cache management, it also means that any other processes running that could be making use of cached data aren't because your game data is needlessly filling it up.

As more of these drives come out their cache management algorithm and cache size will be probed in performance reviews. If you want a drive to fully "cache" your game, buy an actual SSD and install it there. Meanwhile, this hybrid approach should provide an excellent cost trade-off for the general consumer, who should see a huge performance boost, despite not having 100% of data residing in the cache - but that's because it's less frequently accessed and thus contributes less to the perception of performance anyway.

It's entirely different, the plugin is supposed to be sandboxed.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There's_a_Hole_in_My_Bucket

Yes, and gzip isn't so slow that it can only be used on static content. Even if you always generate into a cached version, do you really want to spend 81x the CPU time to gain a few percent in compression, and delay the content load on the client each time that happens?

I am a proponent for more widescale use of encryption, but I am against braindead application of it as you seem to advocate for. As has been called out time and time again, the application of the encryption is critically important to it fulfilling its role. It's easy to get it so wrong in practice that all you provide your users is a false sense of security that encourages them to put more highly sensitive material than they otherwise would have at risk. Then there are other considerations. Once you bring encryption into the fold on every single aspect of your product, how easy is it to test and debug? Is your time to market now twice as long because you have to develop special QA tools rath than use something off the shelf? Is the data actually sensitive? What are these "tampering" and "certain types of attacks" that this encryption is going to protect against? Do you and your team actually understand what they are? If you don't, how do you know the encryption scheme you're using protects against them? What about export restrictions? Where does your product need to be distributed? Does your encryption help at all if your servers are rooted, since they can presumably decrypt all the data anyway? Is the encryption giving you a false sense of security around your customers data? If everything your product does is encrypted, are your customers going to be happy about their ability to implement compatible products? How can customers trust and validate your product if they can't see how it works?

"Encrypt everything" isn't a very well thought-out plan.

If you're going to go so far as to let them on to your network, instead of pranking them you could passively watch who they log into websites as in order to determine their identity, gather evidence, and file charges. Of course, disconnect your other systems - since if he's hacking your wifi he'll probably also try to probe your other devices.

Of course, IANAL, and perhaps monitoring such things is illegal even though it's going over your private network.

I've been looking into GPU-assisted rendering recently. Blender introduced the Cycles renderer not so long ago, and it runs on nVidia cards to accelerate ray traced rendering (apparently there were some problems with AMD). This allows for real-time previews but performance is obviously limited by the card and currently also by the memory on the card, which can limit your scene setup. There is also support for acceleration in LuxRender. This is a welcome addition to their lineup for me, since nVidia's 6xx series were not as strong performance-wise as some of their 5xx series cards for this purpose - at least I believe one of the Cycles developers had stated this at some point, plus a number of Cycles or LuxRender benchmarks led me to this conclusion - and the prospect of buying dual 6xx cards was very pricey in terms of up-front cost (2 cards fully loaded with 3GB is very pricey, plus big PSU), and in terms of keeping them running (power bill).Haven't bought anything yet, but this is definitely interesting.

If you're using it just for gaming, yeah, it's in the over-over-overkill category.