Developers and a ton of other professionals. If Linux/FLOSS could replace Windows, Office, Outlook/Exchange, Sharepoint and SQL Server that's probably 15 of Microsoft's $26 billion dollar revenue. Open source has not managed to commodify basic business and collaboration tasks, despite so many years of trying. It's not all about smartphones and tablets.

No, this is really an absurd profit, Standard Oil's net profit from 1882 to 1906 was $838,783,800 equal to roughly $22B today, so on an inflation adjusted basis Apple's quarterly profit was nearly equal to the majority of the lifetime profits of one of the classic robber baron trusts.

Don't worry, you can buy a $500 phone from my non-profit, $400 will be my for salary and $100 for a junk Android phone. Profit is an indication that you're delivering more value relative to cost than the competition, after all sales price is just a number you decide. They're not competing against some imaginary non-profit, the day Google, Microsoft etc. deliver a competing product forcing them to lower prices they will. Until then, keep blaming the one delivering what people want and not the ones who don't.

The problem is the previous build was visually different while being MORE functional, this build is less functional if you have 19+ years of Windows experience. The previous build had the Windows 7 Start Menu with the addition of a live tiles dock area to the right, it added new useful functionality to the familiar and functional paradigm, the new build is basically a shrunk version of the Start Screen with all the crap that entails and which the majority of users have derided as being less functional on desktops (still the VAST, VAST majority of Windows machines). We had actually started plans for a Windows 10 rollout to our enterprise based on earlier tech preview builds, but those are now on hold and will be cancelled if they don't reverse the insanity. We can just keep using Windows 7 for the next 5 years.

...less than any other ISP? No. Just like Google funded Mozilla this is more of a long term effort to push more people and more services online, where Google can get a piece of it. The "old media" advertising budgets are still pretty huge and people willingly sign up to Google's services so there's no need to get shady. In fact their roll-out is extremely slow if they were seriously intending to become a major ISP, they're really just trying to shame the rest of the country into demanding they get the same kind of service from their incumbents. Who needs cable TV when you got gigabit service and can watch any show, any time over streaming without hitting any caps? That's what Google is selling, of course it's out of self-interest but for tech geeks I think they're on our side in this case.

The other major problem I see is that this thing will have so many holes in it within months that there will be significant distortion to the image. Perhaps they'll use a self-healing material? In fact a quick google shows these students are working on testing such a material on a micro-sattelite.

According to this study reentry speeds are up to 9.5km/s so keeping relative speed to something in that range should not be hard at all.

A 2km spherical asteroid of average composition will have a mass of ~1.3 x 10^13kg, the energy of the B53 is ~3.8 × 10^16 Joules which for maths purposes we can assume is delivered in 1 second so an an imparted energy of 3.8*10^6N which gives an acceleration away from the blast site of ~2.9m/s^2 which should be easily sufficient to avoid impact if it's delivered with any time lead.

For real-time rendering of a simulated environment - that is, gaming - textures are generally stored as mipmaps so the more pixels it's going to take up on the screen, the more detailed version of the texture is used and thus the memory use rises accordingly through the entire pipeline. It's pretty easy to see if you keep resolution or texture quality constant and vary the other. If you're doing some other kind of simulation that might not hold, but for gaming what you said is pretty much false.

Hey, I'm still happy about my purchase but when I bought it I looked at the specs and thought: Hmm, they've disabled 3/16ths of the shaders, but it has the same ROPs, same cache, same RAM... if I buy two for SLI it should perform like the GTX 980 except for having 2x13 = 26 shader blocks instead of 16/32 for a single/double 980. Now I find out that's just not true, it has 0.5 GB quasi-RAM it can't access at the listed memory bandwidth, I feel I got very legitimate reason to feel cheated.

Apparently the ROP/cache isn't a big deal at it makes sense to use 7/8th = 14/16th to serve 13/16th the shaders, if only they'd listed the specs right. But gaming at 3840x2160 with SLI there's a fair chance I could run into a game now or in the future that wants to use all 4GB where it'll either act like a 3.5GB card or drop the framerate significantly underperforming compared to the GTX 980, I don't think that's just theoretical.

I'd probably still be quite cool with a 3.5GB card with 0.5GB of "last resort" memory that's still faster/lower latency than system memory. But they were in error and have admitted they were in error, I think that goes a little beyond "We said we're sorry" Paying some kind of compensation for falsely promised functionality would not be unreasonable (or swapping my GTX 970s with a 8-channel memory version, but I guess that's overkill). I'd be very surprised if there isn't a class action lawsuit very soon.

Delta IV Heavy + deep impact targeting system + B53 = 9MT wherever you want it on the asteroid. The B53 is already hardened for use as a bunker buster so as long as you can keep relative velocity at impact similar to the reentry speed it was designed for you don't have to worry too much about where you land it on the asteroid.

Which brings up an interesting point, the WH doesn't seem to have an intermediate defense against things like small aircraft, cruise missiles, or mortars (the IRA attacked #10 downing street with mortars). I wonder why they don't add CIWS to the roof as a complement to the manpads which are intended for larger aircraft?

Since those guys are likely to be in full heavy body armor as well and humans need to see and breathe the face is still the weak spot, unless you got a high powered rifle or something. Not that you're going to win against a whole SWAT team anyway, but one lone nutcase who has you backed into a corner... I'd aim for the face.

These aren't just slightly confidential, state of the art spy satellites is top secret business. They'll be worrying that a SpaceX employee can plant something to steal technology, reveal capabilities, damage or compromise the satellite once the payload is installed. I'm guessing you need just a microscopic amount of C4 if it can hook into the antenna and wait for a self-destruct signal so that when you need them the most they go boom and the screens go dark.

And the developer generally means game engine developer, not game developer. If you want to write your own engine that's a pretty big job by itself.

Just a technical nitpick, old articles eventually get archived - I'm assuming to prevent spambots making replies and modding them up to get into Google results since there's no real moderators around anymore - so he won't be able to.