Sending the car to pick up the kids after school

We've talked about this - my daughter would rather come to my office after school to do her homework than stay at home, near where the bus drops her off. She keeps asking if we can by a car with autopilot yet. I suspect she'll have her license before the legislature here allows them.

"Secure boot" is mandatory on Windows RT(ARM) devices. I think that x86 Win8 devices are required to support it; but OEMs can do whatever key-fill they like, and can, at their option, support turning it off or end-user added keys.

I'm not saying that they didn't make a mistake somewhere, more than a few locked bootloaders have gone down; but it isn't going to be trivial.

I suspect that the inconvenience offers a built-in deterrent. To use one, you have to plug something into it, and the design offers no means of securing a device(as the pay-charge stations often do, in the form of little 'lockers' or similar that will hold a cellphone until you return).

How long are you going to stand around babysitting your phone in exchange for a few watts of free electricity? It's a convenient thing to have if you are taking a walk and need to top up your phone; but that's a pretty lousy hourly rate.

Aside from pure vandalism, which is possible; but wouldn't be deterred by fees, the only potentially sticky use case I can see would be the homeless. They have the fewest other options, and comparatively low opportunity costs for being near one of these as opposed to elsewhere. I suppose we'll see what team NYPD decides to do if they show up...

I wouldn't think so. That feels more like a promotional discount (like a coupon). You can't sell them, transfer them, or even use unless you're spending even more money through eBay. Taxing eBay bucks would be like taxing the use of the coupons they print out for you at the grocery store register - those are only "worth" something if you're in the store buying more goods later, at a slightly lower promotional rate.

Unless the vendor doesn't support some update that you need because of a change on the server side(either a sufficient version bump that the protocol isn't totally interoperable, or something like moving from Citrix to VDI).

At work, we've had nothing but nightmares with HP's support for their thin clients. One of their WinCE models had a mystery timekeeping issue that kept the clock stubbornly out of sync. After a couple of weeks of hammering they escalated it to engineering, who confirmed the problem and then told us they had no intention of fixing it. The next model ironed that one out; but the last citrix client that HP supports is old enough that Citrix support people start making nervous noises when you mention it, and the official solution for VDI is 'buy a new one'. They also have a Linux based build; but that has (and has had for at least four years, despite my attempts to find somebody who would listen) a pathetic excuse for a 'kiosk' interface that allows you to dump unsanitized commands directly to the shell, along with at least one trivial root-escalation technique). On the plus side, these things are just overpriced VIA x86 boxes with limited RAM and IDE flash-disk-on-module units, and a nearly stock AMI BIOS, so we were able to just spin our own minimal Linux image, and most of the thin client software vendors have an x86 linux client freely available.

The hardware has been sturdy enough, only a few deaths over the entire deployment; but it was massively overpriced for its specs, and HP must have recruited its printer driver team to make the software suck so badly.

Only pointing out two items since you keep circling back to the same exact item that I showed was wrong.

There are numerous public records showing this exact data. There is not a master registry released showing it all in one place. This is why I pointed out Warren Buffet who released all of his data showing you that he really only paid 9% tax, compared to his secretary that pays over 30%.

Absolutely false. Income tax was used as a major leveling factor for the majority of our legal income tax world. The reasoning is based on Socrates's allegory of the artisan.

I know, it makes no sense to look at facts that debunk your delusion so be happy living in it.

So either way in your opinion, the person was wrong. Not talking to the police to begin with, he would have been presumed suspicious. Talking to the police, but not answering a question that is obviously a possible incrimination he is guilty.

That is absolutely not how justice is supposed to work. Justice is best defined by Socrates in "The Republic" by Plato. It's easy for us to look at justice through biased eyes, because it's not us under scrutiny. The Government however shows no bias if you become a target of the same treatment your biases allow happen to others. Something to think about, but I'm not confident that you will.

Why would ASIC be concerned about software-based traders? They know that, while it renders them somewhat inflexible, they are both far faster and substantially more power efficient by doing it in hardware...

which don't deal with mass amounts of data that exceeds the memory limits by orders of magnitude (which is roughly the point it becomes a mild pain)

I was talking to an HPC friend this weekend at the ice cream parlor and he was telling me how their problem had no advantage on GPU processing because they were really memory-bound, not processing-bound.

He has a quad-rate Infiniband going into each machine (40Gbps) and a couple CPU's, and keeps them saturated (say 5Gbps per core).

Looking at TFA's expansion card, with a memory bandwidth of 320Gbps and 60 cores, that's only 4Gbps per core and what's worse, you can't push that much over the PCIe 3.0 bus (only 16GBps).

What they really need is a card with 8 cores and an Infiniband controller right on the die and DMA from one to the other. Then you could fill a housekeeping box chock full of slots with these things and only worry about pushing setup code and managing jobs over the PCIe bus from the mainboard. There's a market niche that needs filling, hardware dudes.

I was expecting 32 cores minimum in desktop CPUs by the start of this decade. All this new supercomputer stuff is well and good, but what about lots of cores for us mere mortals too?

You wouldn't like the speed of typical software on a 32-core CPU using the same transistor count (i.e. at the same cost) of the machine you're running now.

Cache sharing, NUMA access, etc. turn out to be tricky to get fast, right, and cheap. In the meantime, much of the existing software library can't even properly take advantage of a 6-core desktop chip, so all mere mortals would get today from a 32-core chip would be a slower machine.

"STEM: because your outsourced replacement isn't going to train himself"

The problem with the stock markets as they exist today is that there are two groups, those who have extra information (such as real time quotes) are able to better execute trades to take advantage of smaller possible profit margins but there are those who do not have access to all this information and so they can't engage in HFTs (well, profitably anyways) which skews the market.

The first step in the right direction is not more theft, but rather to eliminate delayed stock quotes and make everything be real-time.

The statement that a single analyst can eavesdrop on domestic communications without proper legal authorization is incorrect and was not briefed to Congress.

Of course not, the NSA believes it is operating under "proper legal authorization". Or at least it's deluded itself into thinking that.

The DNI does not say, "The statement that a single analyst can eavesdrop on domestic communications is incorrect and was not briefed to Congress."

See?

How about the market for crude oil? There you have a commodity that just about everyone wants and for which there are always willing buyers. You will notice that even the Iranians, who are supposed to be under economic sanction, are still able to find buyers for much of their oil, albeit at a somewhat reduced price and increased difficulty transporting it to markets. Does not oil flow almost to whomever will pay the most for it? Isn't that how markets are supposed to work, rationing based upon who will pay the most? How is this not a free market?

If you don't like that example then how about the market for drugs which governments classify as illegal. There you have a market that not only exists outside of government regulation or control but continues to exist in spite of active and ongoing attempts by governments to suppress it. Need I go on?

As for the rest of your post, I'm not really sure how to respond or even what the point would be. You're obviously pretty angry about something so what could it be? Are you mad because there are people in this world with more money than you? Are you mad because the government didn't give you a college education for free or now refuses to write off your student loan debt? Maybe you don't like how other people spend their time and money or think that the government ought to confiscate their wealth and put you in charge of redistributing it? Whatever the case may be, I don't see how continuing this conversation with you will lead to anything productive.