That makes it harder to deal with.

What some people seem to forget is that we dealt with the easy stuff in medicine already. We are getting to tougher and tougher problems to tackle, hence why it takes longer and more research to deal with.

Cancer is very tricky. As you note it is a type of issue, not a single disease (much like the flu is a type of viral infection, not a single virus) and it really is the body turning against itself, it isn't an outside pathogen that can be dealt with.

Not in the Star Chamber into which he would be thrust. You assume that the people on the other side of the "debate" are honorable. That's an assumption that is, on its surface, laughable. I don't believe that lying to Congress is honorable. I don't believe that lying to the American people is honorable. I don't believe that unequal application of the law is honorable. Show me where the majority of the Executive Branch of the US Government has demonstrated honor, and I'll agree with you. From where I sit as a citizen, though, "honor" is conspicious by its absence.

And who guarantees he will get a fair trial, with a jury of his peers, before he returns? Who can give assurance that Snowden's attorneys can discover and submit all the evidence? If The System wants to be "fair" about this, then let them demonstrate their fairness by having a trial of those who violated the Constitution as exposed by the revelations to date. Will that happen?

Why hasn't US Attorney General Holder done anything yet about the violations? Because he's part of the problem, perhaps? (I'm a citizen, who thinks that with the current Administration there are legal "haves" and "have nots" in the USA today. Witness Fast and Furious as an example of the uneven application of justice.)

Problems with using social media aside, headhunters are fucking lazy morons. I've never personally had to deal with them, thankfully, but one of my friends, being a consultant, does often and they are universally wastes of flesh. They are not concerned with trying to find the best candidate for the job, carefully vetting resumes and checking experience. Rather they are interested in finding someone as fast as possible and mating them with a job so they can get their fee. They rarely have the faintest idea of what they are talking about in terms of technical requirements and so on.

So ya, I'm sure this doesn't help. Particularly since what people put on their social networking sites varies a ton. Some people have lots of work related things, some have none. Doesn't really translate to job performance, just to what they like to share or not share.

Sounds like more what they are doing, particularly based on the discrimination report, is finding people they think "look good" meaning largely white and particularly good looking female, and sending them on.

The "S" in SEC stands for Securities. It is their job to regulate that kind of thing.

As you say, Kickstarter is different. Not only are you not getting any equity in the company, you aren't getting any financial stake in the project or anything. It is an investment for creative return, not financial, and thus not something that would be covered.

You need to pay income tax on Kickstarter funds, of course, but that's all. They aren't an investment as far as the SEC is concerned.

It is just entering the consumer arena. Hence it is expensive. However since it is entering the consumer arena, we see companies like Youtube starting to support it.

put it another way: WinXP is still roughly three times as popular as Win8, and even Unity is probably more popular than WIn8 but no meaningful is data available.

1) That's not a US rule, that's a merchant/payment processor rule, because they are worried about fraud. Not saying it makes the most sense, but that is why it is. In Europe you'll find that ordering from some Eastern European countries can be difficult/impossible for the same reason.

2) Duh. That is true of all countries. In any country the authorities can legally compel access to things in the country. That is kinda part of being a country. The issue is them doing it illegally, or at least in ways that ought to be illegal. However complaining that they can legally access data is silly, since all countries operate like that. If you think that France cannot or does not get warrants to look at servers in their country when they suspect wrong doing, you are naive.

3) This one is a real problem, though I wonder how it stands in other countries. I know Canada can do it as well, I haven't looked in to the laws in other countries. Many may actually allow it. The US really shouldn't, but I fear it may not be alone in this.

I bougth a copy of Tannenbaum's book (still have it), but could not afford the mag tape. Free it was not!

Bon't forget VMS (Ptrobably an off-shoot of Druidism) or RSX (modern form of Nerthe).

CPM anyone?

Here in Europe, most Christians believe, in your terms, that the picture of God as an elderly jewish gentleman sitting on a cloud (played by Orson Wells) is a useful way of anthorpomorphising nature to explain the universe to children, and a more adult belief system is, as described in John 1: (to quote a previous AC) God is Physics. Physics is God. Immutable, with no beginning or end.. In the phrase traditionally translated as "In the beginning, the word was with God, and the the Word was God" the word for "word" in the original Greek is Logos, which does indeed mean "word" but also is our modern word "logic" and means, in modern terms, "the laws of physics and maths". Additionally, the Bible teaches that the creative force that determines which of many possible transitions occur, and when (explained in science as not specifically predictable, but only statistically so) is love, and that the way to happiness is through pleasing others. These are a useful thing to know in your every day life, but not learned in Science lessons.

About 47% of Europeans think that US Republicans have yet to descend from the apes. A further 40% think they have yet to descend from pond slime.

the NSA is NOT using any of this to prosecute Americans in American courts,

Probably not - they are on good terms with GCHQ, who will have explained to them that the trick is to use this data to find out what they CAN use against you.

Well let's see, what do we use at work... Cadence. No. HFSS. No. Hyper-V. No. ADS. No.

Hmmm... Maybe not so much. There's plenty of shit that doesn't use OpenCL, but where you want speed and big memory, but there's little to no GPU use.

Also you find a lot of stuff that does GPU acceleration, wants CUDA. The research labs we have that do GPU based work are all NVidia all the time on account of CUDA.

Say, RAID-6? That's what you do for drive failures. The problem with drive failure isn't replacing the drive, but the data and the downtime.

With most workstations, this is easy, you can get a RAID controller, usually integrated on the board (Dell's PERC 710s are great) and you can knock in a bunch of drives and go. High performance, high resilience. No such luck on this new Pro.

Another option would be a good external system. Maybe a heavy hitting iSCSI or FC array. That's where you go for really high end, lots of storage, reliability, etc. Ahh well you are kinda screwed there too. No cards to add FC to the pro, and OS-X has no iSCSI initiator, which is shocking for a modern OS, Windows got it in 2003 and Linux in 2005.

Also you might want to look in to SSD failure rates. They aren't particularly high, but they aren't particularly low either. Oh, and they are workload dependent as well. I loves me some SSDs, but don't think they are rocks on which you can build your house.

This is the thing all Mac fans seem to miss: Apple often throws in expensive shit that people don't need, and would rather not pay for. You discover that with SSDs, they are pretty much all "fast enough" for most tasks, meaning they are not a significant bottleneck, if one at all. You can see this upgrading a SATA 2 SSD to SATA 3. You get twice the bandwidth, and benchmarks bear that out, but you notice no operational difference. It was already fast enough for what it is tasked with.

Even high end stuff in nearly all cases. Like streaming audio samples. SSDs are the best shit EVAR as far as those of us that play with audio samplers (NI Kontakt and the like ) are concerned. What you find is that all limits go away with regards to the drive. Want to stream 2000 voices at once? No problem, even "slow" SSDs are fast enough for that no problems.

So the "givashit" quotient on these hyper-fast SSDs is pretty low. If I was running a heavy hitting database maybe. Of course one wouldn't do that on a Mac Pro. For AV work? Nope, regular SSDs are fast enough and space is more of an issue than speed. You can do uncompressed 4:4:4 HD video on any SSD no problem. However you need 13GB/minute to hold it. So 1200MB/sec doesn't matter 225MB/sec is all you need and a SATA-2 SSD could do that. What you need is space for cheap. A comparatively slow 1TB SSD is more use than a lightning fast 250GB one.

It may well be redundant. The servers we use a lot of in our datacenter have "1500 watts" of power supply, divided in to two 750 watt units. They could be upgraded to 1100 watt units, 2200 watts total, if we needed. However, if you do actual load testing on the system, you find peak draw with the configuration we have to be about 600 watts, well under the limit (remember 750 is output, not input, and there's some loss in conversion). So what's the deal?

Reliability. The power is fully redundant. Even if heavily loaded, if one PSU fails the system will not need to throttle. It has WAY more PSU than it needs for that reason. That's also why the 1100s are available. We are running dual 8 core CPUs and 256GB of RAM. If we stepped up to something heavier hitting, 2 12s and 768GB for example, we'd have a peak load over what 1 PSU could handle and need to upgrade or lose full redundancy.

However that doesn't mean it is power hungry if it doesn't need to be. It'll draw around 120ish watts at idle, mostly due to the RAID array since that is magnetic and doesn't get spun down.

Of course I'd think most of this would be known to the kid of person who buys an enterprise workstation or server. That the Mac fans who like the pro don't tells me something.