Yes, but that would be missing the boat. The whole point of cloud computing is that computations do not happen on your local computer. That's what fully homomorphic encryption offers: for a server to perform computations on encrypted data without decrypting the data.

The human body was also not made for typing, driving, sitting in a chair, using scissors, wearing sunglasses, kicking soccer balls or sewing. What else would you like to ban?

So we punish the citizens for the crimes of their corrupt leaders? Better would be to subvert their leaders and try to give them proper access anyway.

Error Correction Codes (aka Forward Error Correction) are typically more efficient for high-error channels than error detection (aka checksum and retransmit), which is why 10Gbps Ethernet uses Reed-Solomon rather than CRC in previous Ethernet standards: it avoids the need to retransmit.

I had the same questions about how this is going to work, though. What is the machine code going to look like and how will it allow the programmer to check for errors? Possibly each register could have an extra "error" bit (similarly to IA-64's NaT bit on its GP registers). E.g., if you do an "add" instruction, it checks the error bits on its source operands and propagates them. So long as you only allow false positives and false negatives, it would work, and could be relatively efficient.

The classifications weren't totally meaningful to begin with, but CISC has essentially died. I don't mean there aren't CISC chips anymore--any x86 or x64 chip can essentially be called "CISC"--but certainly no one's designed a CISC architecture in the past decade at least.

RISC has essentially won and we've moved into the post-RISC world as far as new designs go. VLIW, for instance, can't really be considered classical RISC, but it builds on what RISC has accomplished.

The grandparent's point is a good one: people thought RISC would never succeed; they were wrong.

That's not true. You can't disprove the existence of God, but there's a lot of religious beliefs that you can prove wrong. You can prove astrology and fortune-telling wrong, or parts of the Book of Genesis, for instance.

Serious question: Windows had fanboys? I always figured Windows was for people who didn't care (I mean that in the nicest possible way).

Yup. Freedom 0 (to use the FSF's nomenclature), the freedom to use software for any use, should be absolute. That is what distinguishes a distribution licence (like the GPL) from an EULA. EULA's should be illegal, in my opinion. You should not have to accept a licence to use software that you obtained legally, a principle which is adhered to by every free software licence.

I don't understand. If you don't already have a Google account, then you wouldn't have to opt out. If you do already have a Google account, then you patently don't actually have a problem with their privacy policy, right?

It's your fault that a someone decided to break the law and steal your property?

If you haven't taken adequate steps to secure it, yes. If you leave broken glass all over your property and don't put up any warning signs, someone can trespass or break in and successfully sue you for damages. Not in criminal law, but in common law you typically have an obligation even with your own private property.

In reality you're probably not likely to get sued for having someone break in and steal your gun and commit a crime. If you had a gun in a display case publicly visible from the street and made it very obvious you had no security (door was wide open?) maybe you could be, I don't know. This German law seems to be specific to Wi-Fi, but it's not out of line with other laws and precedents.

I was with you up until "are a bit too easy to misplace". Is your only motivation the small form factor of USB sticks? You can always get a bigger form factor, or just glue some floppy-disk-shaped plastic onto it, to make it hard to lose.

I think being able to have the USB stick flush (or internal) with the computer would be moderately cool, though. I don't know if it's cool enough to try and force the industry to decide on a standard form factor :P

If you're too lazy to actually come up with unique passwords for each site and you happen to have OpenSSL installed (who doesn't?), you can automatically figure out all your passwords only having to remember one.

Come up with a base password, for the sake of argument let's say ABCDEF. For each site, append the name of the site to your base password. E.g., for Slashdot, it's ABCDEFslashdot. "echo ABCDEFslashdot | openssl sha1" yields your password of 040b6c2fb4d5858ad21810deb8e9ee2eb804e2a7. From that password it is intractable to determine what your base password was and hence what your other passwords are.

Some sites require special characters or, even worse, have maximum password lengths (which would suggest they're storing your password in plaintext, yikes). Fuck those sites.

Yes, but that's no surprise. If they were eavesdropping then necessarily they have to have physical access to the fibre. They could just cut it.

I can't think of any that don't. I cut my teeth on PDP-11 assembly, which is 40 years old and has a BLE instruction. I'll admit I've only coded in half a dozen architectures or so, but I've yet to come across one that doesn't do branch on less-than-or-equal.

That was the worst video demo I've seen in recent memory. None of the purported applications were interesting at all.

Quick, you want to pause the music you're playing. Which would be easier? (1) Hitting a pause button on your laptop; (2) Hitting a pause button on your headphones; (3) Putting an accelerometer in your headphones; (4) Finding the exact tiny square on your desk such that if you put your headphones down there and maybe fiddle with it for a couple seconds so it's in the proper orientation to be picked up by a camera? I don't see much future in option #4.

The scanning was pretty bad, too. Even manually taking a picture of a photo or piece of paper, where I'm directly overhead and fiddling with the lighting, it's hard to get a good result. When that started I thought "wow that picture is going to look like absolute shit" and it turned out even worse than I thought. Even at 480p you could the picture was unusable for anything, virtually unrecognizable even.

The worst was the "tapping", though. It actually requires you to break your own finger bones just to register a "tap"?