And two rights make up what's left of the Constitution.

(cue shady government figure)

Mr. President, we managed to cut unemployment with the no to low skill workforce by sending them off to war in some corner on the other end of the planet, but our higher skilled unemployed can't be assed to join a job where they risk their life for pennies. So here's the plan: We start some "cyber war" against ... Oh, I don't know, let's say Generistan for a placeholder. Then we let that war escalate and have Generistan terrorists blow up some of the middle management in certain companies. This should free up some much needed jobs in that area.

Uh... Mr. President? Please, I didn't mean in OUR middle manage... BOOM.

Yes. But that doesn't end the problem, the can of worm this opens is a lot more complex than it seems at the surface. The matter in question is nothing less than the state's power monopoly.

If I get robbed, I don't grab my gun and go hunting for the guy who did it. No. I go to the police and ask them to find him. Why do I do that? Because I trust them to have more power, time, experience and resources than me to do just that. But there's more to it than just them being better at it than me. There are two other, very important reasons, why we have those guys in the first place.

It also serves an important equalizing purpose where EVERYONE, not just someone with the knowledge, experience or resources to do so, can find justice. You needn't be armed to the teeth or wealthy enough to afford your private army to defend your private property and your life.

The second reason is easily overlooked but at least equally important: Due process. It's not just some angry mob who wants to string up someone, anyone, for a crime that happened (the more heinous the crime, the closer the noose). Of course the police isn't free from prejudice and also very interested to close cases, but we're still far, far away from "It must've been Jones, he looks funny and I heard someone say it could only have been him".

If a government is unable or unwilling to fulfill their duty of actually wielding this power monopoly, someone will step in to fill that power vacuum. Usually it's called vigilantism. And usually it doesn't really end well.

A government's power monopoly, like every privilege handed to a government by its people, must be justified by that government. If it cannot justify why it should be granted that privilege, the people will take it back. With or without legal backing.

"World government" is doomed to fail. Not because the red tape would wrap up everything worthwhile, but simply due to human nature.

Take a look at the EU. It's not a union of European states. It's a conglomerate of states that try to find out how to rip off the others for their own goals.

If that's your goal for a world government, we have a world government already.

If your government demonstrated it is unable or unwilling to prosecute someone committing a crime towards you and you have the abilities, resources and willingness to commit the same crime, who would keep you from doing so? The government proved it won't.

All the downloads on TPB are legal.

I compile large projects on a regular basis. We have one machine with 12 cores (24 threads) 256GB of RAM, so I tried running builds entirely to and from a RAM drive. The speed difference between that and using a mid-range SSD was too small to measure (-j12 up to -j64). The difference in performance between an SSD and a RAM drive is significantly greater than the difference between any two SSDs. In contrast, the difference between using a hard disk and an SSD is easily a factor of 2 in terms of build speed and often more.

Video editing is typically done in a nondestructive fashion, so you do a big copy to get the initial data on, but then it's comparatively small transactions. It's been almost 10 years since I did any, but I think the basic approach is still the same. You grab the data from the camera (easier now - back then FireWire was essential because you were getting DV footage from tape with no buffering in the camera, so you needed isochronous transfer. Now flash costs about as little as tapes did). DV footage was 10GB/hour, which was a bit painful to edit with 1GB of RAM, but a modern system with 32+GB of RAM it's nothing. HD footage for consumer editing is about the same data rate. For pro stuff, I believe about 40GB/hour is still common, but even that fits nicely in 64GB of RAM.

You're then going to be streaming it through some filters (typically on the GPU, but sometimes on the CPU) and writing the results out to cached render files. These are fairly small (order of 100MB or so) files containing short composited sequences. When you play, you're doing a lot of random seeks to get all of these and play them in sequence (or just cache them in RAM - with 64GB that's quite feasible, with 128GB it's easy).

Finally, you'll write out the whole rendered sequence. Your cached pre-renders might be at lower quality than this, so you might not use them for the final step, in which case you do have something like a simple copy with some processing in the middle.

Yes, but the best random number generator would return 0000000001 for exactly one phone in 10000000000, so if you sent 0000000001 to a single phone you'd have an insignificant chance of bricking it, and if you sent it to all phones you'd have a small chance of bricking one.

I know, you know, but my dad and Linux just doesn't mix. Because for Linux you need to be a geek. Period.

You don't? Ok, you try to convince my dad, I spent enough time trying.

Because you might be a tech-illiterate and want to be CERTAIN that no matter what you do, it's virtually impossible to fuck up?

No doubt about that. But please explain to me how a game that needs additional features needs to remove others.

Of course, this could still be some kind of "side effect" (because it was removed in version n-1 of the firmware and version n, which you need, is based on n-1), but then at the very least I expect the ability to rollback the update.

This is a nice idea in theory.

In practice, an update can come in various ways. It could be pushed by means of some games (which actually happened IIRC with the Wii), bundled on the medium holding the game. It could even come packed onto some hardware (like, say, some "special" controller or add-on device you need for a certain game).

In the end it means that every single time you want to get a new game, a new controller, a new add-on device, hell, even a movie could be it, every single time you want to slip something "new" into the console, you should definitely first do a through internet search to make sure that it doesn't infect your hardware with some "improved" version of their firmware.

And no, why should it ask you whether you want to update? Why wouldn't you want to have improved firmware?

I don't talk with lunatics, so I rarely notice.

This. A billion times this.

A lot of people don't really separate OS and hardware. They don't see the difference. To them, a computer comes with an OS and that's just something that is on the HD when they buy that thing. They don't even consider that they are essentially two very distinct things.

So when they consider "I need a new computer", they rarely really consider buying a new OS. The OS is simply something that is already on the box when they buy it. To them, this means that "new computer" invariably means "Windows 8". Because it has become near impossible to get complete hardware+OS bundles with anything but Win8.

And not wanting Win8 essentially means for them that they cannot buy a new computer now and have to wait until MS "fixes" this (with a new OS). Or they turn to different OSs. It might be interesting to check how Win8 affected Apple sales.