For real.

Antagonizing the brothers in Egypt, their (Israels) friend in Jordan and the nutcase who's using Sarin in Syria seems like a poor plan.

You're thinking the Yom Kippur war in 1973. The 6 day war the arabs were massing for an attack on all sides, and Israel pre-empted the lot of them.

There was a (relatively lengthy) period of tension building up to that however.

Birthday paradox of DNA testing done in arizona on prisoners.

http://www.freakonomics.com/2008/08/19/are-the-fbis-probabilities-about-dna-matches-crazy/

It depends on the specific technique used, but it's significantly more common than 1 in billions to have matching fingerprints and DNA etc. to people who are definitely not the one being looked for.

Have you actually benchmarked AMD's top end integrated APU? The current one (and the PS4 and XB3 use some semi custom next gen version) are definitely kinda wacky, but they're about on par with a GTX 580 or a AMD 7870 (not counting clock for clock changes, the Jaguar APU seems to sit somewhere between a 7850 and a 7870 in performance but it's a newer part so I'm not sure clock for clock differences).

And yes, they can certainly power a 4 monitor 1080p display setup, but you'd be really struggling to have high settings when doing so natively.

What did I say that you think *isn't* true?

I never said you (or anyone else) can't. The Pixel density in a 24 inch 1080p display is usually 'good enough', but it is by no means perfect. That's why I expect we'll eventually see higher density displays. The tradeoff between density and hardware performance requirements means we're a ways out from that being mainstream.

Considering I develop games for a living, do a lot of graphics programming and work with this problem on a regular basis.. no not likely.

Um...

You realize there are lots of multi monitor setups that support 3, 4, or 6 or even more 1080p displays right?

If you are trying to power 6 displays in the new Tomb Raider or Crysis 3 with a single GTX 680 you're going to have a rough time no doubt. But you can certainly build a Titan SLI configuration or AMD 7990's in crossfire setups. It is not cheap by any means. But it's certainly possible.

I would expect to see the PC space start to adopt 'retina' displays or 4K or something else as we go forward. 4k in TV's is only for really big displays or ones viewed up close, and they're astronomically expensive. If you're spending 5k on a monitor and then complaining that your 500 dollar GPU isn't fast enough you should probably have thought of that expense first, or you shouldn't care about the money.

I saw a (1080p) 120Hz 60 inch TV for 800 bucks this week. New. I'm sure there are better deals in the US. We're not too many years away from an 80 inch or bigger TV being in the 1000 dollar range, and for that 4k is worth it.

Now yes, the PS4 and XB3 trying to do 4K might be... troublesome. We'll have to see exactly the specs on the GPU and then there's a tradeoff between lower quality at higher resolution or higher resolution and lower quality.

lets stop right there.

There's no such thing as a currency with a flat value, immutable in time. A currency can inflate or deflate, and it can do that at rates very close to 0, but landing on 0 exactly is virtually impossible.

Inflation is preferable to deflation, it minimizes the value of hording money and it reduces the value of debt. Those are both good things.

As though there aren't bubbles with other kinds of currency too? You can certainly try and manipulate bubbles by playing with currencies.

That's a bit assbackwards.

Printing money in a liquidity trap, to make sure there's a steady hum of inflation and to keep up with various forms of economic growth and in the meatspace world of adjusting to the supply and demand of physical currency is definitely manipulation, no way around it. The question is who is in control of the manipulation. With central banks private banks you at least have shareholders and the government behind them. With bitcoin (or gold), not so much. Gold is definitely under the thumb of governments and corporations. Just not yours. And it doesn't really matter which country you're in, that's true.

Bitcoin is great for people making a pyramid scheme and currency manipulators, and for people who bought in early. But it's only really suitable as an effort to evade tax and engage in illegal activity (including simply farming bitcoins with power you don't have to pay for).

Lol.

That was cute.

Gold is more expensive to extract than bitcoins, but is essentially the same thing.

That's why we don't use it. Or would you like to hand control of the value of currencies in the world to australia, south africa and peru (and arguably canada)? Yes, China, the US and Russia produce a lot of gold too, but they're big countries that need a lot of money in any absolute sense by virtue of being big.

A country in it's own currency without massive external debt cannot just 'collapse' without a willful effort by the government to do so and if the government wants to tank the economy they can, with or without a currency they directly control, the weimar example oft cited neglects to consider their massive war reparations owed in french francs.

If you want a hard-core mathematical proof that your code fulfills certain post-conditions etc., there's a large body of knowledge about how to go about it when the problem is posed in a functional programming language. Doing it to an otherwise unconstrained piece of C code is much harder.

If you want a hard-core mathematical proof about how your code behaves in time and space (for a value of time and space that makes your software market competitive) often a procedural representation is better.

Look at what happened between ATM and IP networking: "Another key ATM concept involves the traffic contract." For TCP/IP over Ethernet, the "channel contract" was a reamed-out muzzle diameter.

Two viable business models:

* Usain Bolt with a water-resistant wristwatch
* Arnold Schwarzenegger with a waterproof wristwatch

One permits more formal math than the other. I'm guessing Bolt is cooling down before 'egger has finished filling in his entry form.

And yet you do not recognize this as the feature that it is.

http://www.usinflationcalculator.com/inflation/current-inflation-rates/

Despite the (virtual) printing of ~83 billion dollars a month the dollar is not magically dropping. Liquidity trap and all that. The ability to print more money as needed is a *feature* of the system. Any currency where you cannot do this is seriously lacking in long term sustainability and is essentially only a pyramid scheme for early 'investors' and currency manipulators.

Sure, move the ability to manipulate to an unregulated self interest rather than a fiscal and monetary based system balanced by elected officials and shareholders. Brilliant.

But yes, there are millions of reasons to use a currency other than your own governments, and mostly that boils down to various iterations on 1: business in that country. 2: to avoid tax. 3: to evade tax or 4: illegal sale of goods.

This doesn't really change anything. Paying taxes to the US government while it was invading Iraq and torturing people was supporting terrorism too. Whether you had to pay in bars of gold, gold certificates, a fiat currency or something else you still had to pay it. Whether you have a bitcoin being donated or a slab of US dollars you anonymity is not impacted particularly. You only know who controls the value of one of those though.

I totally agree. Seven days is long enough for a vendor to formulate a sober verbal response and run it through channels when their customers are already being rooted due to eggregious failings in their software products.

At the very least the customers can increase vigilance around the disclosed vulnerability.

Sure wouldn't hurt if this policy leads to fewer eggregious and embarrassing software flaws in the first place.

Tough.

Seriously.

You can bring all that up in an attempt at a legal defence. But in the narrow portion of 'when can they snoop around' you're pretty much screwed.