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.

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.

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.

On what grounds would they cordon off your house? If a judge says 'go ahead and cordon it off for public safety' they pretty much can.

Absent any proof there was child porn on the drives the suspect couldn't be compelled to decrypt them to provide that evidence.

The FBI however was free to try and decrypt the drives.

After proving that drives at least contained some child porn it was no longer possible.

Imagine the same scenario with a house. The police think you have a grow op. But they don't have any actual proof of a grow up. They have a power bill, show up at your door and you say 'sorry, I run a server farm, not a grow op, no you cannot come in'. The police not believing this story keep snooping around, they watch you bring in lamps and fertilizer and numerous suspicious people bringing packages out. Eventually they get some sort of valid evidence that you have at least one growing illegal plant in your house. Now they can get a warrant, and you have to let them in.

You don't have to provide the police a key to your house, unless they can convince a judge there is definitely something illegal hidden behind your front door. Then you're boned.

While those are all legitimate points, the 'google retaining ownership' part may change when it becomes a consumer product. Right now it's in a testing phase, so google owning it makes sense. Whether they stick with that plan for commercial release will be harder to say.

Broadly I think is the question of what can google glass add that won't be a giant privacy invasion. You don't particularly need ads, some other company could just try and sell a device. But the ability to discretely record a video or take a picture anywhere is bad enough with cell phones and private investigator cameras wearable glasses just adds a new level to that. Just sticking your cell phone screen in front of your face isn't much of a problem, but to go beyond that its impossible for the data gathered to not represent a serious privacy threat (insofar as cell phone tracking isn't already).