What makes it blackmail and extortion? My neighbors already know that I occasionally pirate stuff. I'm pretty ok with this.

I don't know, I found that having kids gave me far more time to keep my skills up to date. Though, after having user CVS, Subversion, Mercury, GIT and more, sometimes the issue is that having gone through so many stages of evolution, it's hard to unscramble the different tools. In my case, it often is a lack of patience with the new tools with watching the same damn mistakes being made over and over. I really like GIT, but when I was forced to work with bazaar, the tool of choice from the 22 year old tool hotshot, I constantly found myself baffled senseless when I'd try to check in code and I'd find myself having to check out and repatch manually to check in. Personally, I felt it was less an issue of me specifically and more an issue of a tool which takes the enacts route of making 10,000 things easier, but removed the simplicity of the basic function of the tool which was the ability to check out and check in.

I think often younger programmers come in with new tools such as python and a dozen other new scripting languages, but some of us have been scripting or coding in thirty different languages over a period of decades. It's not that we lose the interest in learning new tricks. It's that we want to see that there is actually value in the new trick before wasting time learning a tool which might simply not offer any benefits. Personally, I finally bent and learned python (which is still consider sloppy as hell) and the some numb nuts insisted we needed Ruby too. After a few iterations of that, you end up with a code vase employing 10 languages and when the kids who added that code move onto their next job, we need to replace them with a new guy who now has to learn 9 new languages just to get started. Sometimes limiting yourself to a two or three lesser tools which take more work is more efficient in the long term.

I agree with the original post that people need to adapt to new methods and technologies. Someone who isn't interested in test driven development or peer programming or code review in a modern market is pretty much useless.

Pretty convince you've hit the nail on the head. This isn't an issue of cracking encryption but simply gaining initial access to the phone via pin

I wrote an internal paper in at an old job suggesting a method of water marking that would be invisible by the viewer, require almost no CPU performance requirement and also would survive multiple generations of re-encoding and scaling. Water marking is not what you think it is.

As an example what I suggested would take an H.264 file that is already encoded and alter each macro block only slightly so that there would be a slight (not noticeable) phase shift in the chroma planes. It would be progressive towards 16 -20 "hot spots" and would require no encoding since the phase shift can be implemented by simply altering the CABAC or CAVLC just by a little bit. It could in theory increase the file size by several bits per hour, but that was a fair trade-off in my opinion. The end result would be a video that is entirely the same to the viewer.. after all, the chroma planes are such poor quality compared to the luma with that it would not deteriorate the viewer's experience at all, it would be able to be done while delivering the file using a simple change to the web server delivering the file and it would survive multiple generations allowing the original purchaser's account number to be identified from the file even after scaling and re-encoding.

In fact, I did a demo of this tech on a real-time streamer which was pretty cool. We set up a demo of 9 MPEG-2 transport stream remultiplexers in a fashion which appeared to be geographic oriented and streamed television signals. We then produced from those 9 MPEG-2 remultiplexers 512 different multicast streams. We then altered the PMT (program map table) for the viewers of the signal in a geographic region to selectively choose the PID of different streams. Then we went to the pirate bay and waited for certain water marked TV shows to appear. They had been ripped and sometimes re-encoded for iPhone. Once we knew the region it came from, we changed the geographic regions to be local to the region which was represented by the video we downloaded. Rinse and repeat until such time as we narrowed the signal to individual house numbers, the third week. You might be surprised to hear it, but we clearly identified and verified the user which had been ripping the shows. We asked him to stop and that was the end of it.

What was the benefit of this? Easy, we managed to create a relatively simple system that could be employed to identify people pirating shows and ask them to stop. The other end result, the content providers backed off their insistence that we employ DRM and content protection. Using the same technology for video on demand allows users to view their shows on web browsers without DRM.

In case you're wondering how complex this was... it took me about 4 days to implement the stream parser, about another day and a half to implement the CABAC/CAVLC tweaker and about two weeks testing internally before it could be trialed. Took a little longer on the EIT inserter as it wasn't really meant to function on a fine scale regional system, but that was just a matter of some database work.

I have also worked on some DRM systems designed to be entirely non-intrusive. That is a much greater challenge since DRM should be hard to crack and should also allow users that do have rights to use the files without noticing the DRM. As you might notice, it almost certainly can't be done. So I focused instead on water marking in such a way that there's no chance it would ever degrade the viewing experience.

I hate both types of rights management. But, if people like myself don't try to solve the problem in such a way that the legitimate user isn't impacted, then the idiots in hollywood will do it in ways where they are.

I started a project on this nearly 2 years ago within my company to make use of WebCL as a means for providing real-time video coding and decoding. The problem I faced more than anything else at the time was audio synchronization. I also made a bunch of noise about this with regards to the stupid video tag being codec dependent. My implementation however was purely H.264 at the time.

I'm glad to see someone taking this serious. This has many options including providing support for DRM for vendors who want to use it without forcing DRM into the W3C standards. As I said... about damn time.

Sad you would choose to live somewhere you'd actually feel the need to depend on a gun. :(

BTW... I recently experimented a bit with guns. I can see it to be enjoyable to spend a day at the range... well if I could do something about the noise at least. I just could never see actually being intelligent enough to tie my own shoe laces, but being dumb enough to live somewhere I would actually need to use a gun for any purpose other than recreation or worst case, getting food... just gutting it sounds quite awful. But in either of those cases, while I might use the gun as a tool or toy, I can't see ever needing it to be so reliable I couldn't get a second chance to sort things out.

Well... I guess some people voluntarily prefer to put themselves into circumstances where they might get lucky and get a chance to kill another person.

Cool! You found a way to remove that last burden of free software which is free IT services. I'm guessing you're volunteering to work for free and install Linux and train all the users and support them over the long term all for free?

AWESOME!

I used to buy a new laptop or desktop every 3 months. Now I buy I'm only upgrading ram or hard drive occasionally. My "Power House" laptop, a Core i7 with 16gigs of memory is from two summers ago. I have little or no interest in "POWER GAMING" machines. Instead, portability and battery life area far more interesting. Windows 8, who the hell needs to upgrade for that. I broke out old computers which were sluggish on Windows 7 and installed Windows 8 upgrades and they ran beautifully. Even gave them away to people who might have bought new machines otherwise.

These days, I tend to buy new toys like projectors and book binding machines. New PCs aren't that interesting.

That said... when I was in the states two weeks ago, I bought 3 Surface Pros... I should go back and buy 3 more :)

Seriously... if you can't type over a hundred, it's not ever worth talking about.

"Power Users" expect more..,. besides, who wants to have to look down at their keyboard to type?

There is still a cost on large ISPs. The holy land of carrier grade NAT would be to NAT the entire ISPs v4 network and route statics for customers who want their own addresses. Even with big iron (think ASR9k) the active translation table can be far beyond the scale of the hardware.

That said, a more conservative approach would use private IPs for the P routers and internal addresses for the PE routers. Then a VRF would provide a /30 between edges for private networking. Another VRF would carry static routes for customer subnets. Customers would be CGNATed at the PE from a single IP for multiple customers. This makes the router requirements larger at the provider edge but much easier to maintain. Then it would use 2-4 IP addresses (depending on use of /30 or /31 subnets) per PE router and completely free up the pool used for P routers. This means a national scale ISP like Comcast could probably function on a /16.

I think he has a point. Unless Hollywood can sort out the issue with how to perform cuts without forcing the eyes to refocus all the time, it will be disorienting and to some people even sickening. If 3D gets even more realistic, it'll be a bigger problem.

Maybe it is less important to fix the problems with the 3D itself and more important to focus on transitions which are softer on the eyes and brain. Just watch films from before smooth transitions. You can see how much better films became when a simple smooth transition method came along.

messages are pretty easy to ignore. I feel guilty ignoring invites. This will just make it so that spammers will send these messages using invites instead.

I agree that standard coding techniques are a good thing. I prefer however to focus it towards and existing file or module. If a file was written in a given style, follow that style. It makes the file readable.

Generally I have found that working with a pile of libraries written by third parties, there's no way you can be sure that you'll have a full product with a single given coding style. So, you're already used to calling outside of your own module using alternative coding styles. But when you mix the coding styles heavily in a given file and worse, in a given function, it becomes unreadable.

Things can easily get carried away of course. If you look at gstreamer, the variance between modules regarding coding style is a nightmare. Product is great and I always enjoyed working on it, but there's so little consistency in the system due to being overly complex that some people will do the bare minimum to get their code working with it and then just code an entirely different way after that. It would have worked better of course if people would make an attempt to move their integration code into a separate file and make the transition between files instead of strictly between modules.

I'm hoping at some point that tools like swing will also allow making borders between like languages to have a method of enforcing coding style at the edges of modules.

"...Trisquel GNU/Linux operating system, a free software replacement for Windows 8"

Ok, driver support (yes, still an issue), motion sensor support, touch support, documentation, etc... I use Linux all the time... from my Windows machine. I admit, Linux has come a long way, but when companies like Dell are still using 6-8 months to get a single computer out of the door (which was already in production), it just means we're still not there. Even when they managed to ship, it still wasn't 100%.

Biggest problem with Linux these days is still that there's too many damn options. For example, there's gobs and gobs of graphing calculator programs for Linux, nearly all of them still need to be finished and most of them don't have any developers anymore.

Why does it always have to be one or the other?

At one point, I decided to watch some videos of Dawkins and found him to be obscene and utterly rude. While I am personally an atheist, I truly disagree with people suggesting that this man is representative of me. It's reached a point where religious people use him as an example of the raving lunatics atheists are. So far as I can tell, while he's also an atheist, he takes atheism to a degree of being a religion. Between him and organized non-religion groups, I'm thoroughly disappointed.

The point is atheists shouldn't ever be organizing as being atheists. It should not be a defining characteristic. A person who is an atheist should be something else. Maybe an artist, a musician, a scientist, an engineer, a good will worker. In short, an atheist should have a great deal of time to spend on things that are just more important and more meaningful than religion. Instead, these groups (including the Dawkins lackies) spend all their time being atheists and they even get into the "I'm better than the people who define themselves as believing in nonsense since I'm a person who defines myself as opposing believing in nonsense." It's like the morons who stand outside of meat plants protesting slaughtering cows while wearing a leather jacket to stay warm.

People... please just be more.