I have been following the NSA revelations with keen interest. I am not a cryptologist. Advanced math escapes me. But I have understood enough to know that the NSA has been poisoning the well for our entire society. They, not Al Qaeda, not Iran, not China, pose the most existential threat to American freedom and the ability of my kids to grow up in peace. So I ask my fellow Americans and freedom-loving foreigners alike, can we not resolve to resist and bring down these criminals in any way we can? Whether it's better encryption, darknets, ostracism of the actual flesh-and-blood human beings practicing this tyranny on the rest of us, or many, many other measures, can't we all commit to doing what we can, where we can, to putting an end to them?

What the NSA, White House, Congress, and Judiciary (ie. FISA courts) are doing is un-Constitutional, meaning you can't get more illegal and deserving of maximum penalty than that. Murder is terrible and wrong, but it does not rise to the level of undermining the basis for our very society and the social contract that binds people to government and vice versa. With murder, one person dies; with undermining our system of government you get chaos, civil war, deprivation, demise of the rule of law, and masses of men, women, and children dying. Which is worse?

So what we're looking at right now, folks, and I mean all of us on the political Right and Left, is an entire government that has colluded to violate the Constitution, that is, the social contract that separates our country and society from Malthusian consequences. There can be no penalty harsh enough to punish them for what they have done. If we do not, as a People, levy that punishment on them now, immediately, then we deserve the misery of the slavery that meek acquiescence consigns us to.

Why would it have delayed the Vita by 3 months? The PS4 controllers would be rolling off assembly lines in the far East regardless of where the PS4 is launched. Providing they had sufficient supply then the same controller could be used in one system.

I think the touch pad could be used as a substitute for the touchscreen in almost all cases. The Vita TV could just draw a dot or something where somebody was touching and they'd get used to it. The backpad isn't used as much so it's loss wouldn't be so felt and could probably be mapped in many instances (e.g. to the lower shoulder buttons, or to a player holding a lower shoulder button and touching the pad at same time).

Camera is understandable, but there are things that could have been done which weren't.

To give everyone a laugh at libertarian nerds who thought it was a great idea to invest in it.

Because the designers of the Linux random number generator code designed things such that if RdRand is compromised, it doesn't reduce the strength of the random number generated. However, if it is not compromised, then the randomness is stronger.

Why should we give up a potential benefit if there is no possible harm?

Then you plug your tablet into the stand / dock / port replicator / hub or whatever and use it as a desktop. There is massive potential for a device that can be used like a tablet but is still a full blown desktop when you need it. An Asus Transformer style device would be far more useful running Windows than it is running Android. And I say that as somebody who owns one.

It might be bad but if that's the software your org uses for its timesheet, then it's a fat lot of good to buy in a bunch of tablets that won't support it. And if not VB6 then any other piece of software written in-house or purchased that the org has accumulated and expects people to be able to use to do their work.

That really doesn't make much sense. The Vita has a touch screen. The PS4's controller with its touch pad could act as a substitute. Without it the system from the UI through to the compatible games it can play are seriously gimped. Besides, the Vita TV releases on November 14 - exactly one day before the Playstation 4 does, albeit in Japan while the PS4 launches first in the US. They could have shared the same controller.

I hope that if this thing launches in other territories it ships with the proper controller.

My understanding is the network transport is still under discussion. But Wayland could send bitmaps of each windows surface and you will have a thin client of some sort on the remote end that renders these surfaces on your screen, lets you move them around etc.. Your client will send things like mouse and keyboard events in the other direction, receive new bitmap fragments, resize events etc.

Of course since Wayland is running over OpenGL ES 2.0, it's possible to imagine more exotic scenarios where shaders, vbos, textures etc actually live client side and the server side OpenGL ES impl treats the client like a remote GPU. Or maybe some hybrid where client / server balance the load in some way doing some stuff on the server and some on the client. Could be gnarly but there is potential to offload at least some processing out onto a client assuming its capable of it.

I expect in the first instance that it would just be sending server side rendered surfaces since this is obviously far easier to implement.

X is simultaneously bloated and full of arcane and obsolete junk that nobody uses any more. X hands most of its stuff off to extensions increasing context switching latency. Most apps are passing around massive pixmaps or complex rendering instructions meaning any supposed advantage X used to have from primitive lists has largely disappeared.

It's obviously a bottleneck and this is why Linux devs (including many noted X developers) are keen to get rid of it.

I'm sure it will take Wayland a while to find its feet and for dists to transition fully but when it does Linux will be better for it. Doesn't stop people running X either - it'll just be over Wayland and probably not noticeably different either.

The Vita TV controller comes with a PS3 dual shock controller. Why didn't they use a variant of the PS4 controller with a touch sensitive pad?

It seems pretty dumb to release a box to play Vita or PS4 games that has a controller that can't even replicate most or all of the control surfaces. The Vita even has a rear touch pad though it's probably the front one that matters most. The Vita TV could draw a little circle to indicate where the user is touching on the screen.

The real reason some manufacturers use aluminium is not because it's a better material but because people think it's "expensive" and they can jack up the price of the phone accordingly. Indeed all the wifi / signal problems that aluminium has caused demonstrate it's a pretty shitty material for devices which contain radio antennas. It also gives a convenient but bogus excuse why the back of the device can't be removed to replace the battery or provide an sd slot.

Of course now there is a plastic iPhone there is even less excuse for not including a removable battery or memory slot.

Because it Wayland has less context switches, especially during compositing and doesn't require marshaling data like inputs & coords into some 2D format like X which is too braindead to understand anything else. Basically it's a bottleneck. Most apps aren't even using X primitives anyway - they're throwing pixmaps or complex drawing instructions around which have been generated in an extension like Xrender.

It should make for a much more responsive desktop. It doesn't stop running X apps either since X can run over Wayland. I expect there will be a transition of at least a year or two when most dists are running both by default until they've ported all the mainstream desktop apps over. Then it's likely that X will be something people have to install rather than a core package.

Sure, unless you're wearing gloves, or when you have wrinkled fingers from swiming or bathing, or you have grease on your fingers from eating, or you have a job where you have to wash your hands a lot (doctor, nurse, new parent, etc).

To me this sounds like a question asking, "what are you going to do with your Walkman?" TVs, and TV-viewing, are quite obsolete. The device you watch anything on now is irrelevant. When you can watch anything you want, any time you want, anywhere you want, why would anyone spend money on a single-use device like a TV to conform to a very outdated form of media consumption?

Companies that base their revenue model on 1980's technological realities are about to wake up to the harsh reality of no revenues. It happened to Kodak, it's happened to the RIAA companies, and it's even now happening to the vaunted Microsoft. And yet, none of the other, related companies, think it could happen to them.

So I must answer the article's question with a question, why would I throw hundreds of dollars into a purchase which can only do one thing (READ: HDTVs), and that only after I have thrown away hundreds of dollars more on a service (READ: cable TV), that I don't need or want?

God, I look forward to the day when the Baby Boomer dinosaurs retard no more social progress for the entire world with their ineptitude and irrelevancy...