Coins are much easier to make forgeries of compared to notes. In the UK approximately 3% of £1 coins are Counterfeit according to the Royal Mint. A $5 piece would be a very attractive target due to its high value.

Rather than making new coins I'd scrap them all entirely and go with something like BitCoin. It would offer considerably lower costs and greater convenience. I see now reason to continue using notes and coins now that we have a viable alternative.

If somebody has a history of shoplifting, keeping an eye on that person when they're in your store seems perfectly sensible to me.

I also have to wonder why half the article was about Minority Report when there are few similarities between pre-crime and this system. In Minority Report arrests were based on information from the future, while this system is based on past information. In Minority Report people were arrested and charged for crimes they had yet to commit, while this system simply gives stores better information on which customers they need to keep an eye on. The differences are so pronounced I fail to see why Minority Report even needed to be mentioned.

I disagree. Many people, particularly Americans, think freedom of speech is all about the first amendment. There's freedom of speech as defined in the first amendment and then there's the general principle of freedom of speech.

In my opinion, if an organisation is taking action to prevent you from speaking freely then it's a freedom of speech issue. It doesn't matter if the censorship is being performed by a government or a private company. I'm not saying that private companies have any obligation to promote free speech, but censorship on a private website is still most definitely a freedom of speech issue.

In this case, the matter is so trivial it wouldn't even be worth discussing if it weren't for Reddit's long history of censorship. As it is, this seems to be another case of Reddit making up rules on the fly and banning people when they haven't done anything that's against the terms of the site.

If Microsoft want to do something good they should start by releasing an operating system that doesn't cause huge amounts of inconvenience, lost time and upset to their uses. With about a billion PCs running Windows the amount of harm Microsoft are causing the world with Windows 8 and 10 is immeasurable. If Microsoft cause just one hour of inconvenience for each of the billion PCs that's the equivalent of 1585 lifetimes in lost productivity (assuming an average life of 72 years).

When Microsoft are knowingly releases operating systems that are intended to forward their own goals at the cost of customer time, productivity and flexibility, I have a hard time taking their philanthropy seriously. Charity begins at home and Microsoft should start by helping their own customers instead of harming them.

They've certainty fucked me over. I have a large MFC program that's having to be rewritten with Qt because Windows is no longer viable as a platform for productive work.

How the hell can it cost $5 to register a drone? I suspect the record will simply be stored in a database without even being looked at by a human. If every institution were as inefficient as the government, it would cost $5 to post a comment on Slashdot.

I despise monopolies and the government monopoly is the worst of them all. Governments abuse their monopoly position far more than any cable company or operating system developer. The government takes money from you at any every opportunity while giving you pretty much nothing back in return.

This simply isn't true. The gameplay offered by most Wii games was utterly abysmal, and the real reason it succeeded was because it had a very marketable gimmick that appealed to non-gamers. People saw the tennis, bowling and golf games and instantly understood what the console offered.

After playing with the console for a short time people realised that there was no gameplay in most Wii games at all, and as such the console met with a quick death. While it was hugely successful for a few years, the sales dropped off very quickly as core gamers abandoned the platform and word spread amongst casual gamers that it really wasn't very good. While the Wii only lasted a few years, the PS3 and Xbox 360 lasted a good ten years.

Nintendo had to get a new console out fast due to the sales of the Wii collapsing, leading to multiple years of losses. Sadly, they once again focused on gimmicks with the Wii U and not on gameplay. This time the gimmick didn't appeal nearly as well to casual gamers and the Wii U was DOA. Ultimately, Nintendo stopped focusing on gameplay with the Gamecube. Now it's just a maker of novelty items that you quickly grow bored of.

As for specs not mattering, if you have the same game on two platforms and one has superior specs to the other, which version are you going to want?

It says in the article that they intend to sue Blizzard:

Presumably once the terms of the deal are disclosed further suits will follow. Personally, I'm with the bot maker on this one. Blizzard is entitled to take action against the bot maker within the bounds of the law, but it is not entitled to steal the source code. If it's okay for Blizzard to steal other people's intellectual property, then I hope they're okay with people pirating their games.

I see absolutely nothing wrong with this. This is exactly what intelligence agencies should be doing - investigating rival countries' military capabilities and assessing threats to the nation.

Meanwhile, what intelligence agencies most definitely shouldn't be doing is mass surveillance of their own people. Intelligence agencies don't exist to suppress descenting opinions. They don't exist to erode freedom. They don't exist to keep the populous inline. The reason they exist to assess external threats to the nation.

It's a sad state of affairs when China and Russia are setting an example to western agencies on how they should be acting.

Probably increases it immensely. It shows you can see that costs of using Facebook are far greater than the benefits it offers. A person who can make such a judgement is likely better at managing their finances compared with somebody who willingly hands over their information in exchange for the opportunity to broadcast aspects of their personal lives to the world.

...Being tracked by Zuk

I'm generally pretty privacy concious (use a VPN for all browsing, self destructing cookies, fake accounts everywhere, no account for Facebook, Twitter, etc). However, with your phone it's impossible to avoid being tracked by Google and Facebook. I have no mobile data plan and keep my Wifi off most of the time, but I still suspect they get a lot of data on me.

Windows has gone in the same direction and it's impossible to use that without being tracked by Microsoft. Linux is the only remaining option for anyone with concerns about privacy. Sadly, most people don't have any concerns about privacy and don't realise how they can be harmed and exploited through their data.

I think the privacy war is over, and we lost.

That's not a great endorsement. The NetBurst architecture in the P4 is legendary for it's terrible performance per clock. While AMD focused in increasing performance per clock with the Athlon, Intel intended to increase performance through higher clock speeds. They thought NetBurst would scale up to 10GHz, but things didn't work out that way and AMD ended up beating Intel on every metric - overall performance, performance per clock, performance per watt, performance per dollar. The P4 was so bad that Intel went back to the P3 and designed the Core from there. Saying it offers the same performance as the worst Intel processor ever doesn't fill me with enthusiasm.

...all marketing, no substance. The one exception is Linux, which is all substance and no marketing. Of course, that itself is is something of a problem.

To feel good (as in not miserable) I need eleven hours sleep. It has a pretty terrible effect on my life and I have to work part-time, which is unfortunate because there aren't any well paid part time jobs. I can reduce my sleep to 8-9 hours if I sleep for 6-7 hours at night and get an extra two hour nap during the dame. Unfortunately getting that two hour nap is very hard because it's impossible to get to sleep when you know it's essential that you get to sleep. I gave up with the two hour nap approach because 80% of the time I wouldn't get to sleep. It would be great if I could feel good with just eight hours. I'd have a lot more free time and could become a more productive member of society.

From my personal experience it seems that H.264 Hi10P delivers superior quality compared to H.265. With H.265 the focus appears to have been on reducing bandwidth usage rather than increasing quality, so it's not something that interests me. Besides, H.265 is considerably more processor intensive compared with H.264. I use use the 5 second skip back feature regularly for when I miss a subtitle or if I want to see a bit again. When you skip to a set point in the video the player has to decode everything from the last key frame to that point, which might be up to ten seconds of video. A decent PC can do this near instantaneously with H.264, but with H.265 there is a delay which can feel quite jarring. With disadvantages in terms of quality and performance, I'm not liking H.265. That said, I'm sure video streaming sites will love the bandwidth savings.

...how hard would it be to transmit power to the cars through the roads? A few years back wireless power was the big thing at consumer electronics shows, with demonstrations of televisions without power cables. Since then I've been wondering if this could be implemented for cars. If you got rid of the batteries it would vastly reduce the cost and weight of the cars, plus eliminate the issues related to recharging (range anxiety, charge times etc). You could have a small battery in the cars for driving on roads that are "off the grid" with the option for larger batteries for people who do a lot of off the grid driving. Is this technically viable or is there some reason it couldn't be implemented?