No. The people who employ lawyers. Lawyers are just tools.

That makes a lot more sense, and I suppose it could be correctly termed as an efficiency multiplier. That would imply an astoundingly low actual efficiency for current engines expressed as a % of released energy.

I'm sure it would have been obvious had I RTFA.

Still, the engineering required to convert much of the thrust from such a reaction seems feasible, even if it suffers further efficiency loss through conversion. I'm thinking fusion thrust turbine generator, or something similar. And with that setup, it seems like something relatively close to a 40x efficiency gain might be made if the 40x thrust is real. I'm sure that would not put even the thrust energy itself at a real efficiency near 80% though. But we're still talking about expelling fusion byproducts and fuel that have obviously not been completely consumed, so that makes sense.

So if the other engines had an efficiency of 2%, this could get 80%? And if they operated at more than 2.5% efficiency, it would be fusion with a net energy gain - a real reactor? It might easily not take diversion of much of the thrust to produce the energy necessary to sustain the reaction.

So what if getting a sustainable fusion reaction requires a thruster design - that's easy to engineer around.

We'll have to destroy their territory and NOT keep them around, not even as pets. It's the new age of humane imperialism.

Firefox can easily eat close to 1GB with a couple of windows and a few tabs in each, after a little while. That's with all scripts blocked, plugins disallowed, etc. I'm left to wonder if the vast majority of websites themselves have become too bloated to keep in memory. Either way, Firefox does not score well on memory usage or idle cpu usage (whether scripts are allowed or not) compared with other browsers.

And I guess someone might get shot for suggesting spraying millions of gallons of water per day into the air for evaporative cooling - in the desert.

It seems you use the same strategy as Lulzsec and are at least as bad at articulating it, if somewhat less pompous. :)

Shangri-La, in the Beta Quadrant, using an intuitive visual scripting language (that works) to program the biological quantum computers (running GNU Hurd) that have replaced our brains.

Proof that it works to within a certain margin of error given specified system parameters and on hardware proven to be within certain specifications and failure rates? I believe that software engineering still exists as a discipline. Proving software without system specifications is impossible from an engineering perspective, but there is still testing. Is that what you're griping about?

Yes, but there are limitations on when the criminal repercussions apply. There is also the possibility of abandoning what you've bought, rather than breaking DRM. That makes it just a bit less like true involuntary servitude. You can still get out without criminal repercussions - just economic repercussions. That's mainly why these things have been able to get so far.

I'd say we're a hair's breadth from balls-to-the-wall and possibly moving in that direction. Any expansion of criminal IP infringement definitely moves us in the direction of involuntary servitude.

If only voluntary involuntary servitude were actually illegal... The DRM thing is actually more like financial contracts. They put you into voluntary servitude. You can break them, but there are consequences for doing so. But not, generally, criminal consequences. Now, if legislators criminalize the breaking of the contract, it can actually become involuntary servitude. Perhaps the best argument against things like the DMCA in combination with criminal copyright penalties is that they unconstitutionally enable involuntary servitude. Once you've signed the contract (by buying the good) you can't break it without criminal repercussions, rather than just civil repercussions.

I wasn't a geek. Geeks were the kids who were not intellectual, and were generally considered good for nothing by their peers, including the intellectual ones (nerds). Geeks were what might now be considered mindless fanboys of something or other (not something requiring an intellect to understand, although sci-fi would count). They were the ones who lacked grooming and social skills, and also did not apply themselves in school, not because of lack of interest but because of lack of capacity. It was a true insult to call someone a geek.

So if this trend is true, then it looks like one of the old usages is coming back into trend. It's simply not possible for a term that supposedly describes highly intellectual and motivated people to come to encompass so many people as the word 'geek' has consumed. It can't be a catch-all for anti-mainstream becoming mainstream and cool, because such a thing cannot exist in humans, at least not in the bulk of humanity as I know it. Particularly since the bulk of humanity can't simultaneously be anti-mainstream, and cool, representing a pinnacle, can't also be a near-universal trait. The 'geek' as it has been recently symbolized was always a myth, and impossible by definition.

Apple will implement them in their applications. Mac developers will follow. Everything else, like open source implementation and so forth... Well, NeoOffice might implement these features, so there's the LibreOffice support. Other cross-platform applications might not follow.

Tell me, does Microsoft Office implement these features? If so, I've never heard of it. Apple at least is implementing and making such the default behavior, in addition to changing the expectations of users and thus pushing developers.

Yes, it scales linearly. But if you set a 1-second minimum on hashing, and a GPU normally does 3.3 billion/second, then you've done 3.3 billion times the work. Not twice the work. Plus a brute force attempt would not know the number of rounds, and so would have to try, say, everything from 1 round to 9.9 billion rounds, just to be reasonable. So requiring a second or two of hashing has potentially required billions of times more work to generate the hash, and requires billions of times more work to break (which already takes relatively a long time), assuming no shortcuts.

Perhaps it's reasonable to do this much work when generating each password. How many new users/minute do you expect? If you add users at that rate, there are bigger scaling problems.

Stronger forms of authentication should be used in addition to strengthening passwords, since passwords will likely still be one factor used. Even two-factor authentication employing a password plus a "stronger" form can become meaningless if the password can be brute forced and the other factor overcome with social engineering or simple theft.

Yes, the really slick people (not necessarily the smart or wise ones) increased their own profit and prestige by creating really expensive training and certification programs that are used by many people who are never going to be fundamentally competent. It's the way things are done.