No need to remove it they should just add a physical "off" switch, maybe with 2 cents worth of plastic sliding over the web camera. Then the paranoid geeks can pick it apart and confirm that yes, it really turns off the power and the tinfoil hat brigade can breathe a little easier. How many have you seen that have say taped over the Facetime camera on their Mac Books? Oh right, they assume OS X isn't secretly recording them. I honestly don't people see that as nearly as big a deal as the always-on.

Too late, they're already full of hot air.

The Steam hardware survey seems to disagree, 14% of gamers are now happy running Intel chips so how many non-gamers do you think find them good enough? A GPU running as part of a CPU with a <100W total power budget is never going to compete with dual SLI/CF 200W+ discrete chips, both Intel and hardcore gamers know that. Intel just wants to be in mainstream products without AMD/nVidia getting discrete chip sales and they're succeeding, check any statistics for computers shipped with discrete graphics and they're in decline. Maybe it's an AMD APU, but most of the time it's an Intel.

Yes, because AMD has totally been flowers and sunshine ever since. In their Q1 2013 finances stockholder's equity was down to $415 million, one more total disaster quarter like Q4 2012 with a $473 million loss and they're filing for bankruptcy. Meanwhile nVidia's market cap is more than twice as big as AMD (and that is after AMD's stock recovered, it was 5x a little while there) and they're making money, this is not a back-against-the-wall move. It's the realization that building a complete SoC is complicated and just having good graphics is not enough, better to play the PowerVR game (who are not productless IP trolls) and be other SoCs than to be nowhere at all.

Yes, and I think his description of the passive-aggressive attitude of fanboys are pretty spot on too, particularly this bit:

Also known as "the boy who cried wolf" and you can only take so much of it before you go into "stop wasting my time trying to make me try the same broken thing you lying sack of shit" mode. Note that the same argument is also automatically used to invalidate any opinion that is more than five minutes old, since things are "totally different" now. And that attack is the best defense is popular in all walks of life, if you find your choice hard to defend go attack everything else as being worse. Another thing I see in forums that don't have moderation like /. does is trying to win by flooding the comment field, like there's 300 comments and 50-100 are from the same person aggressively assaulting anyone that posts anything that doesn't fit his opinion. It certainly makes it a total waste to read the comments.

On the other hand, a filtered version of the truth isn't the same as an unfiltered version. If you see a blog with nothing but praises, it's rather obvious comments are being moderated and that you won't be able to read what people really thinks about the subject. If you want constructive discussion you moderate to stay between the extremes where it is wiped out by the mud slinging and being wiped out because dissenting opinion is not permitted. But if you want public debate, well it's often not very constructive it's more of shouting match, people with closed minds and no intention of changing their position trading blows. Not too much different from politics really.

Like lack of qualifications has ever stopped any /.er from arguing they know best anyway. This place is pretty much the definition of the Internet peanut gallery.

Life that already exists will have very strong evolutionary pressure to find new and untapped resources that are exclusive to them, it's not certain that living in the middle of the most lush rain forest is better - evolutionary speaking - than in a barren desert. But just because it can spread almost anywhere, doesn't mean it can start almost anywhere. In fact, we still don't have any experiment or strong models that will create life from inorganic compounds indicating that it is quite hard and quite rare. The exact right mix of chemicals and conditions may be an extraordinary event that only happens once every hundred million years in one place on earth, but it only needs to happen once.

The trouble with creating new numbers is that you'd disrupt everyone else, imagine you'd want to add a new number 5 then old 5 would become 7, 7 become 9, 9 become 11 all the way up to 419 becoming 421 and beyond. Generally here in Norway if you build say a huge block instead of several small buildings you get multiple numbers like 13-17, if you build say three houses on a lot that used to have one they become 13A, 13B and 13C. Which is also open-ended (my current workplace has buildings B-H, A is demolished and doesn't exist anymore) while 419 1/2, what do you do if you build another house? 419 1/4? 419 3/4? It's a poor system just asking for a situation it can't handle.

Somewhere I feel that analogy fails, it is more like "the artist formerly known as Prince" who decided an unpronounceable symbol would be his new stage name - for contract reasons. Imagine he'd asked that all government databases also would identify him the same way, his driver's license, his social security card, every form of public registry should now support this symbol. Or that everywhere there is a male and female restroom there should also be various options for crossdressers, transgenders, ladyboys and whatnot other combinations that exist somewhere between or outside the traditional genders. Or that stairs with no elevator should be generally outlawed because it's discriminatory to wheel chair users. Having one doctor trying to treat your rare disease is very different from trying to make world revolve around a few people with special needs.

Presumably it was in the requirements or it was done to check off some fluffy requirement of logical input validation. If you can't play off the "Well I can type in anything here, two women, two men, this software has no checks at all" "Okay, any other rules we should add or does checking it's a man and a woman satisfy requirement 72" conversation in your head, you haven't been to enough of these meetings. It is exactly the kind of simplistic rule you throw in to close a nasty requirement, then anything else is a change order because they didn't provide a complete list.

If you're doing any selective marketing or sales campaigns or you show them any form of targeted advertising or you're selling customer lists then it does matter or at least it has value. Statistically speaking males and females of same age have vastly different interests, so they're not going to stop collecting that information.

But building a pi*(384,000 km)^2 = 463,000,000,000,000,000 m^2 solar panel is not, the effective energy density per m^2 is just that of Earth minus the atmosphere and cloud cover. When it reaches earth sunlight is 1366 watts/m^2 and 75% of that reaches ground level. In the best areas for solar panels you get 25-30% effective sunlight so in total you get about 20% of the effectiveness of a space based 24x7 solar panel. What do you think costs more, setting up 5 m^2 in a desert or sending 1 m^2 into space - or building it in space? Make that 20m^2 and you've covered most populated areas on the globe. Not to mention that with cosmic radiation, micrometeorites and such space is actually rather nasty, maintenance is a bitch and recycling impossible. Outside of space probes space-based solar power makes no sense whatsoever.

Because private companies are totally not flip-flopping based on quarterly performance and managers playing musical chairs. Most of this is simply political theater because none of these missions are funded, so nobody really cares how often they change except to make other politicians look bad. NASA's got plenty more mundane missions which will continue.

Well considering the telegram would have to be 47 years from now, Charles would have to live to 111. Must be a frustrating life, he's now 64 and in an age where most are looking to settle into retirement he's still waiting for the "job" he's been chosen to do from birth. And if her mother is anything like her mother again, it might still take another 15 years because I definitively think this is going to be one of those "over my dead body" successions.

All real world machines are analog, but the communication is digital (signal/no signal). SOS = ... --- ... = 101010001110111011100010101 (for human convenience a dash is three dots long as is the pause between letters, seven between words). I agree it's an odd wording though, with that logic the blind have been reading digital books for ages - with their digits, even.