For this reason, Windows now has IOMMU virtualization enabled to prevent DMA attacks (starting with Windows 10 RS4/1803/April 2018 Update): https://twitter.com/AmarSaar/status/985618204184768513 In conjunction, tianocore also has IOMMU based DMA protection for 2 years now: https://github.com/tianocore/edk2/tree/master/IntelSiliconPkg/Feature/VTd. So even if the OS isn't up yet DMA attacks are still locked out. Assuming you are running a recent OS and firmware, this is now a non-issue.

For this reason, Windows now has IOMMU virtualization enabled to prevent DMA attacks (starting with Windows 10 RS4/1803/April 2018 Update): https://twitter.com/AmarSaar/status/985618204184768513

In conjunction, tianocore also has IOMMU based DMA protection for 2 years now: https://github.com/tianocore/edk2/tree/master/IntelSiliconPkg/Feature/VTd. So even if the OS isn't up yet DMA attacks are still locked out.

Assuming you are running a recent OS and firmware, this is now a non-issue.

Carbon Dioxide is a very stable molecule, getting it to react requires a large amount of input energy. While TFA make it sound like we are gaining energy from this process, there is no free lunch.

The reason why this reaction produces energy is because it is consuming pure metallic sodium and converting it to sodium bicarbonate. Pure sodium does not exist in nature at all, because it is so reactive. Manufacturing metallic sodium is an extremely energy intensive process that involves splitting molten salt (Sodium Chloride) into sodium and chlorine gas using electrolysis. This is Downs' Process. The sodium bicarbonate that this process produces has industrial applications, some of them involve reactions that release the CO2 we just spent of ton of energy capturing back into the atomsphere, baking breads and cakes for example.

Any method that involves electrolysis is going to use a ton of energy. If we are going the electrolysis route, then might as well produce hydrocarbons using electrolysis to convert water and CO2 to syngas, which can then be used to produce hydrocarbons via the Fischer–Tropsch process. Hydrocarbons are way more useful from an industrial standpoint. The most obvious is we can burn them to power legacy Internal Combustion Engine vehicles, which closes the carbon feedback loop; but that is just one use. Hydrocarbons can be used as feedstock for all kinds of organic chemistry processes, we can make tons of plastics, polymers, lubricants, carbon fiber, etc. All of these things cannot be produced without oil mining today. The nice thing about hydrocarbon synthesis is that it can replace mined fossil fuels in all our existing petrochemical manufacturing processes. The same cannot be said about baking soda.

As someone who writes BIOS for a living, no we can't go back to legacy BIOS at this point. Chipset initialization has gotten too complex to fit in the 1 MB of RAM allowed by 16 bit real mode. UEFI is actually a big upgrade for firmware engineers since it natively supports the C language and 64 bit long mode. None of the silicon released by Intel or AMD in the last 5 years would be bootable with 1 MB of RAM.

"Apple pulls Netflix from App Store; shifts focus to Apple original paid programming"

I fully agree with Microsoft that UEFI has a forking problem. But that is caused by the fact that BIOS vendors take tianocore as a baseline and extend it. The root of the issue is that tianocore itself does not provide a complete UEFI firmware implementation, it gets about 40% of the way there and expects the Silicon vendors (Intel, AMD, NVidia, Qualcomm, etc.) and BIOS vendors (AMI, Phoenix, Insyde, Biosoft, etc.) to fill in the rest with proprietary code. This problem is actually almost identical to the Android fragmentation problem. But really what Microsoft has done here is create another fork for their Surface products.

The good thing is that Microsoft has open sourced a lot of that fork and have pushed the percentage forward from 40% to maybe 50 or 60%. If you look at what they have released though it is very customized for Surface... they have come up with their own answers for a lot of stuff that the UEFI specification already has answers for; the BIOS setup menu/HII database being the most notable. The percentage gained could be much higher if they didn't insist on duplicating code already in tianocore just because they think they know better. Separately, the tianocore guys are also trying to solve the fragmentation problem. A complete open source UEFI firmware implementation is under development right now: https://github.com/tianocore/edk2-platforms/tree/devel-MinPlatform I am one of the active contributors to tianocore. It is my hope that if Microsoft is truly interested in trying to solve the fragmentation problem that they are willing to work with tianocore and contribute to it instead of building their own competing open source community.

The one thing that all of us should keep an eye on is the potential for a Microsoft attempt to use the Windows Hardware Compatibility Program to force every PC on the planet to use MU. Creating a firmware mono-culture would give Microsoft much more control over the PC industry than Windows itself already affords them. They could turn every PC into nothing more than a Surface with a different OEM logo on the lid. It's certainly one way of solving UEFI's forking issue, but it would significantly strengthen the walled garden they are trying to build with Windows 10 at the same time.

So... there are less a-holes with a juvenile sense of humor writing annoying programs... are we really supposed to lament this as a loss? My guess is they all grew up and now write bitcoin mining worms.

The fact that the Internet's design allows this behavior has been known for decades. The only thing that is new is China was caught doing it, though probably most world governments have done it by now. That is why many in the industry are pushing for 100% HTTPS adoption. It's free and easy now thanks to https://letsencrypt.org/

I think for a lot of the younger tech talent, its about more than just pay. As an employee of Facebook/Google/Amazon/etc. you can go in to work at 10pm wearing a T-Shirt and sandals, not fill in a time card, and often have a good lunch paid for by the company, and usually have admin access to your own personal development machine... the culture in a government office could not be further from this.

Giving this same level of pay and benefits to a government employee would be seen as egregious waste of taxpayer money and it would end up plastered all over Fox News/CNN/MSNBC/etc. as an example of gross government excess. Uncle Sam can't be seen as wasting the people's hard-earned money, so the best accommodations for a government employee are equivalent to the typical dingy DMV office. The government can't compete with private employers purely based on our social expectations of them.

1.5 oz would be a very light beer, my guess is that number is taken from Bud Light. Most craft micro-brews would be in the 3-8 oz range. Still your number holds up well. The price for high quality malted barley is more like ~$1/lb, most of that price difference is from the malting though. The ~17% price increase in raw barley would probably translate to a ~1% price increase in malted barley purchased by the brewing company.

This will hurt meat prices much more than beer prices.

Under the leadership of this nutjob the Mozilla Foundation's administrative expenses increased 20% to $60 million as of 2016 their most recent tax filing. I've always wondered how the Mozilla Foundation has been blowing $360 million a year, given how terrible Firefox has gotten.

I'm sure it will have broad benefits to Google's bank account, both inside and outside of China. This is a new ethical low for Google. They are willing to blatantly facilitate human rights violations by a volatile autocratic regime, and at the same time have the gall to lie to US Senators about it just to make a quick buck.

At this point it is extremely clear that Assange is nothing more than one of Putin's puppets. Wikileaks is nothing more than an attempt to weaken the soft power that western democracies project. All part of a grand plan to rebuild the Russian empire with a Putin dynasty.

Probably just another con-artist trying to scam venture capitalists. Extraordinary claims like 2-3x better energy density requires extraordinary evidence.

Intel has the same fundamental problem with foundry that AMD had 10 years ago. Every 3rd party company does not trust Intel to prioritize their products over Intel's own products. Intel will always build their own products on the latest process node first. If you fab with Intel then your wafers will always get 2nd priority over Intel's own wafers. The only way that is not the case is if you are such a huge customer that your contract requires Intel to construct an entire new factory just for you. Then you have to be able to guarantee an enormous wafer volume... the only company large enough to generate that much demand is Apple. If you are smaller than Apple, then you are competing with Intel's own products in the same factory. So basically, you either have to be a huge volume customer or a small volume customer, otherwise a fundamental conflict of interest exists. If you are small volume, then you also have the problem that once you threaten to move back to TSMC Intel might just buy your company like what happened with Altera.

AMD realized this, came to the (correct!) conclusion that their own products would not generate enough volume to pay for building a 32nm fab. So the only way to get significant 3rd party foundry business was to spin off their manufacturing group as a separate company (Global Foundries.) That way Global Foundries could be a neutral 3rd party that would take orders from anyone. Intel would have to become a fabless company and sell their fab to get significant foundry business.