Well, the rule of law as it has been settled over the last couple of centuries doesn't consider suspicion a burden to the target. That's because when the Bill of Rights was framed the cost and difficulty of surveillance was so high it was assumed not to be a serious threat to liberty. And that's where the current understanding of the US Constitution's limitations on police remains to this day. The law hasn't adjusted to the fact that it's now possible to *mechanize* suspicion and surveillance through cameras, software, networks and databases.

In fact this problem predates technological advances. The emergence of a government with powerful, permanently constituted security agencies is something the founders never dreamed of. That is the problem with "original intent"; in many situations what the founders might have intended is a matter of speculation. For example we now accept that 4th Amendment protections protect people in public places (Katz v. United States, 1967) but for a long time the limitation to a person's home, self, and papers was taken literally (Olmstead v. United States, 1928).

It is certainly not true that three letter agencies can do whatever they want, wherever they want; but the limitations the Constitution specifically puts on them do not cover their current capability to infringe on individual liberties, and the courts thus far have declined to check them under the Ninth Amendment or through extensions of other amendments..

If you object too loudly to "cloud cheating", we're probably just going to be saddled with "cybercheating" instead. Unless that's already taken for marital infidelity involving cybersex.

It's not always driver bugs. Many of the fixes are things that tapdance around bad, buggy code within the game itself. Oftentimes the studio's devs play fast and loose with shader parameters or API compliance- and NVidia does it differently than AMD, etc.

Any time you see a "MAY" within a standards document, it really ought to be treated as a "SHALL" unless you know you're working on ONLY a target environment that the "MAY" doesn't affect you. Prime example would be something along the lines of VBO mapping to host addressing space. The spec says that it MAY stall the pipeline if you do this while you're in the middle of a rendering pass. Well...NVidia's implementation knows what VBOs are in-flight with a rendering pass and will stall only if it's known to be about to be used by the current pass in progress. AMD's drivers took the other, in fact, sensible approach because it's easier to implement and gains you performance overall if you don't have devs doing stupid things- they stalled ANY time you mapped any VBOs involved with the rendering pass in progress.

A major studio (Who shall not be named, nor shall the game...who knows, maybe you can guess the title...) did this in their GL code- they recycled VBOs, but did it intra -frame instead of inter -frame. The first is realtively safe, producing pretty good performance, the other's very much not so, based on the lead-in I gave just now. I should know, I've used it with some of the games I've done porting work on (Because the studio did the same thing in DirectX...which has the same restrictions here...). When you do it intra-frame, on NVidia, it slows the render pass down, but not unacceptably because it only stalls as long as needed to assure you're not corrupting the render pass. AMD, until they re-worked their VBO implementation would plummet to seconds per frame slide-show renderings on an X1950XTX card when it was THE hottest, fastest card out there- because it would stall the pipeline, taking milliseconds to recover, each and every time they re-mapped the VBO they were re-using to conserve on card memory on the frame's rendering pass.

Was it the driver's fault? Not even remotely close to the truth there. But...people will blame the driver, calling it "buggy". In fact, that's what happend, even.

Seriously, what sort of a question is that? "will White's statement — 'It's hard to see (it) obsoleting our technology' — come back to haunt him?"

He'd do well not to underestimate Apple - they've got some damn good designers on staff and a team that's extremely good at turning technology on its head. And if there's one technology that's long overdue a head turning, it's TV.

I don't know about the plastics companies, but as for the others, YES! Try to run on a legalization platform and see how quickly the various law enforcement fraternal organizations back your opponent and shout you down.

The drug dealers most certainly do NOT want competition from CVS.

I'd put it a little differently:

It is illegal to pirate.

But, it may not be immoral or unethical to pirate.

It certainly is completely impractical to forcibly prevent or punish piracy. Even extreme measures such as monitoring every packet on the Internet, or just shutting it down altogether could not stop piracy. There is always sneakernet. Two people could swap flash drives with a quick handshake.

GPL is very much a matter of hoisting copyright extremists in their own petard. If they've played hardball with copyright and patent law, then they have no grounds for complaint when they are caught in a GPL violation. If they weren't complete hypocrites, they'd admit they erred and do their best to make amends. Instead, we often see them trying to deny they did anything wrong, using laughably weak arguments to make their case.

Not the case for Crysis 2. Crytek scaled it back a lot, and actually focused on making a game rather than just a tech demo. When it came out, it was DX9 only. Later they released a patch that introduced DX11 support and had some bigger textures, but at launch it was a DX9 title.

Ever hear of NIMBY? It's easy to be against all regulations that protect other people's property.

Wanting protections for your own backyard makes you a concerned citizen. Wanting protections for everyone's back yard makes you an environmentalist -- and apparently a socialist.

Anyhow, the concerns raised by the group are reasonable, but raising a reasonable concern should not amount to veto power. The sensible way to respond to a reasonable concern is to commission an environmental impact assessment, give the public a little time to critique the study, then make a decision one way or the other. Either way there will be people who aren't satisfied, but there's no point in even talking to people who will only be satisfied unless they get their own way.

The long coexistence of wildlife and launch operations at the Kennedy Space Center is promising, but not conclusive. You can't generalize or reason from first principles one way or the other in cases like this. You have to work from location-specific data. While it is hard to put a precise cost on an environmental impact assessment, the cost of determining whether there's a reasonable concern here isn't likely to be a significant financial burden to a project like this.

And the only reason the 'bath salts' even exist is that the far more desirable cannabis is illegal.The longer cannabis is illegal, the more crazy dangerous legal substitutes will be made. Had cannabis been legal, the guy would have been way too busy trying to carve a walnut into a pipe to eat anyone's face.

Well if you really are unable to do a minimal amount of research to find out, ok I guess that's a reason not to buy, but I would think it wouldn't be to hard to just, you know, look shit up. nVidia's site is a good place and not hard to get to.

Also if you are talking desktops, and I assume you are from the use of the term board, then you are talking nonsense. The rebranding has been in the laptop space, not the desktop space. With laptops they do have some mixed naming as there are 600 series parts from their 40nm and 28nm lines. With desktops all 600 series parts are 28nm.

Ultimately it really doesn't matter as what you should check are features and speed, not an arbitrary choice of what technology they use.

But whatever you like to justify your purchase decisions.