I never thought about how errors needed to be inserted into maps so they could be copyrighted. Wow.

I wonder if this is the reason why Google maps of Portland Oregon sometimes label the Banfield Expressway as "Soldiers Field Drive", which is in Boston Massachusetts. The errors seem to come and go, and seem to be limited to road names that are also identified by route numbers.

There would be no need to reverse engineer a pristine copy of the work. Simply proofreading a single copy and correcting some of the existing errors, while at the same time, introducing a few new errors of the same type would be enough to confound any attempt to make a positive identification of the source.

This approach has an incredibly high bogosity factor. I can't imagine anyone in the publishing industry with half a brain who would spend any money on its implementation... Oh wait. We are talking about the partially brain dead idjits who thought DRM was the best thing since sliced bread....

If I was going to do this, I would probably also play with the kerning to force some repagination, add some space characters before the newline at the end of some paragraphs, and so on. This approach to DRM is about as simple to get around as using a black magic marker on the edge of an "uncopyable" CD disk.

Server side is where margins are at. AMD borked a server CPU generation and wound up cleaning house. If the world were different this would not be a recoverable error. Since Intel needs AMD to blunt monopoly supervision, Intel server tech will probably be delayed to give AMD a chance to catch up a little bit. Intel will keep inventing clever new stuff, but stuff it in a closet again as they have done many times before. This isn't a big deal since server tech is so way overpowered from what it needs to be that Intel could probably coast for 6 years before they had to start innovating again. Maybe they'll retask some engineers from servers (and God please, Itanic) to mobile. That would be nice.

Imagination Technologies, owners of PowerVR, recently became members of the Open Handset Alliance four months ago. Open Handset Alliance is the Android booster org. Before this they were a strictly proprietary driver company, and Android devices that used their tech had binary blobs. The binary blobs aren't gone yet, but they soon will be replaced with open source licensed drivers and actual hardware specifications.

So Microsoft needs there to be a mobile GPU tech company that has secret drivers to sell their mobile software on platforms that can't be made useful with a software flash. They cast about and set their sights on nVidia, who has already signed their devil's deal to keep how their PC hardware works a trade secret. They probably promised nVidia something useless to get this - that's their usual course. Now Microsoft's puppet hardware ODMs will build Microsoft nVidia GPU-based tablet platforms that can't run Android, won't sell, and have to be dumped all over the place like Surface RT is now. Expect Surface RT 2, whatever it's properly named, to use this tech. In the end nVidia gets hosed - again. If you sup with the devil, use a long spoon.

Intel used Imagination Tech in their Atom line as well, and that's why you can't get good Linux drivers for those otherwise sweet mini-itx boards. Yet. They're coming. Intel has dropped them though for some reason now in favor of in-house tech.

It's really hard to track the machinations in GPUs.

Nothing. nVidia can't admit that Microsoft (or some Microsoft puppet) owns the source code to their Windows driver, patents on some of their graphics tech.

Consoles are priced low and top tier console makers are looking at tens of millions of units at least, so they fight for every millicent and they have leverage. It probably didn't math out for nVidia or Intel to provide the CPUs (or for nVidia, GPUs) for this generation. The result is that we get a console generation that's a midrange PC with off-the-shelf AMD GPU. That means quick porting of games between consoles and PC and for the most part an end to exclusivity of titles. For the consumer that's a win. For the console maker's it's a club to bludgeon each other with. And that's a good thing too.

Sooner or later both consoles will be cracked, but at this price point that's unlikely to yield the kind of savings that cracking the PS3 did. That was remarkable tech on launch day.

nVidia's graphics drivers include proprietary and patented Microsoft technologies. They cannot open source them, ever. They made their deal with the devil and they have to live with it.

Via's greatest value is to somebody else. So if nVidia tried to buy them they would just be outbid.

Just to be clear, that was an honest "good luck with that" right?

Why would they "get blown out of" court exactly? Do most federal judges enjoy things which, to me, seem to intentionally violate the constitution? Does google lack the funds to hire lawyers who would be competent enough to point out how idiotic these things are? I'm not a lawyer, as most slashdotters are not.

Which may be his point when he said we're "leading."

Seems a bit like saying "You chose to have nice stuff, it's partly your fault that someone stole it." Unless they offered it to the NSA, simply collecting the data isn't exactly inviting the NSA to shit all over the constitution.

Your NDA is a civil contract. Technically, the only consequence you should face is monetary (maybe injunctive if they could get around the 1st Amendment). Though in the modern world, who knows. Soon as the Feds make breaking a contract a crime, we can reopen the debtors' prisons. Imagine the profit potential for the prison industry. Won't that be great. /sarcasm

Yes, they do, but they don't play coy about it. This Markov chain cynicism, where commenters suggest every organisation might commit every evil they can dream up, gets really tiresome. For the most part you have to actually be a government representative before you're thuggish enough to use child porn as an excuse for other abuses.

You SPEAK a language? Like as in using your mouth with other people? You must be new here.

If this is medical school is in the USA, you and your fellow students are undergoing a very thorough indoctrination in the appropriate use of clinical detachment. Those who cannot handle that skill set rarely finish the course.