I love how McAfee, once -- a long time ago -- a credible virus scanner, became one of the sleaziest dogshit brands in tech.

There *is* a heck of a lot .. on 16 Psyche.

I dunno about you, but the idea of shipping off in a space ship for a year or two, to mine my fortune in space minerals, sounds kinda .. fun ..

The concept here is that if the NSA had done this in the United States, there would have been a court case and the courts would likely have sided with newspapers, invoking the First Amendment.

But once again since this is overseas, the government is pushing for things that would never be legal here; it is curious that they tried to pressure the British though.

We know during war things happen that would never be legal on this soil; it'd be interesting to see a full accounting of what the US gets away with, or tries to, when it is out of the reach of the Bill of Rights.

I am sure they'd talk to me like a child if I brought this up: I just don't understand the threats we face, and the countermeasures and surveillance we need to keep up with them, and that the only reason I can even talk like this is because guys like them do "what has to be done" to keep the US safe.

Whenever this sort of thing is justified, it is nearly always an external threat; and it probably overlaps with the Four Horsemen of the Infocalypse they always invoke to justify kneecapping encryption.

But they always start mid-thought. They don't want to talk about why there's a nuclear arms race, or why so many people are angry at us. They just want to start with "they are," and therefore authoritarian policies and programs are justified.

We know a lot of this is about industry. It takes two to tango, though. We buy what they make.

At least there are nachos.

*THREE MONTHS!?* THREE - AND NOT ONE. You're saying like around NINETY DAYS OF SWEET SPOTIFY ACTION before I can pay Spotify to rip off artists?

Holy shit, someone grab my axe and merkin, I'm gonna climb up the nearest hill, rip off the merkin, and windmill my shit in this gleaming, numinous, glorious dawn.

THREE MONTHS. MY GOD YOU'VE LOST YOUR MINDS.

Sure, you're posting anonymously, but *I'm* cancer.

I get the sentiment, but there's absolutely no basis for what you're saying. There's no anti-trust issue because Apple isn't colluding with a bunch of other manufacturers to make sure they also do this.

There's no FCC issue because this isn't about denial of service or the phone going outside the bounds of what a cell phone is allowed to do in terms of broadcast strength and frequency.

There's no FTC issue because no one is forced to buy an Apple phone and there's no end-user expectation of being able to replace the battery on an Apple phone (which customers know when they buy it). If the FTC were going to get involved in this in any way, they already would have come down on printer manufacturers like a ton of bricks long ago, since they've been running similar toner and inject cartridge scams for years and years. Unless the batteries are exploding or have an unreasonably short lifetime compared to similar products, the FTC doesn't give a shit about whether you can replace them.

I get that it feels super-unfair, but the fact is this is a case where you just have to rely on market forces. Apple will just get shittier and shittier in this kind of behavior as long as people keep buying the phones. I don't and won't buy any Apple products. The only one I have in my home is a work-provided MacBook because I have to do software development and testing on it.

So sure, "fuck Apple", but don't expect the government to step in and fix something because you can't get Joe's Computer Shop to do something that Apple explicitly said only it could do. And before you make an argument that right to repair laws should let you do this, bear in mind that the consequences of installing dodgy high-capacity lithium batteries in phones has been widely demonstrated. All Apple has to do is say that they can't trust random repair shops to have sourced safe, reliable batteries and therefore not disabling the phone would present a danger to their users.

He's either a) using really bad terminology to ask why we're using rasteriszation over ray tracing techniques or b) using somewhat bad terminology to ask why we're using polygons over implicit surfaces. In both cases the answer is really the same.... modern GPU hardware is designed and optimized for doing lots of rasterization work using polygons, and it's a far more efficient use of the GPU hardware than either the use of implicit surfaces or ray tracing. Both ray tracing and the use of implicit surfaces to render a scene share the same problem at a low level. To process a given output pixel on the screen you have to have local knowledge of the *entire* scene that's being rendered, since a given ray or reflection could in theory bounce off any surface at all. Existing rasterization techniques don't have this problem, so while they produce less realistic scenes, they're far more efficient, meaning you can put more content in the scene and have a better overall end use experience.

I want to see web sites stop popping up their crappy interstitial pages I have to click through to get to contact, almost all of which implore me to subscribe to their stupid e-mail lists (not happening, ever, specifically because of how they pushed).

I want to see websites stop forcing me through "OMG LOOK AT ALL OUR NEW FEATURES" slides every time I log in.

Put a lil.

A lil.

Flashing thing on the side or something. But get the fuck out of my face.

ALL autoplay bullshit must end (fuck you cnn.com. I mean fuck you for about a hundred other reasons but especially fuck you for that.)

The sheer number of browser extensions I install to try to protect what is left of my privacy and stop apeshit web developers from engaging in screen bukkake has become absurd.

This is not what the Web was supposed to be.

And *yes*, I would be fine with about 2/3rds of the damn Web collapsing for want of ad revenue if what was left was clean and user-friendly. I have reached that point.

I'M MAD PEOPLE.

A CRAZY, MAD, WILD-EYED, BIG-BOTTOMED ANARCHIST.

I WAS HERE EARLY AND YOU WILL HEAR ME.

(they will not hear me. no need to point that out.)

>>> reviewed by actual humans. .. Max Headroom!

Yes, thank god we've all converged on the clean, easy to understand x86 / x86_64 architecture.

CMake + Github is about as close as we have in C++ to Maven. Its still pretty ugly though, because C++ doesn't have a consistent build system and the number of options for building and linking is at least two orders of magnitude more than you have to deal with in Java.

Most software is obscure, full-stop. Just because you don't use most (or even any) of the packages on that page doesn't mean that Qt isn't a viable mainstream library, or that there's anything wrong with it.

Qt, like any other large framework, has a learning curve. If you're writing an application that works just fine using whatever libraries you're already using and you're only targeting one OS, then you probably aren't motivated to go climb that mountain. On the other hand if you're writing software (possibly with a complex UI) that is intended to target multiple operating systems, then Qt is probably the single best framework out there for doing so. Otherwise you're in for a long haul of writing your own less functional version of some subset of Qt features in order to abstract platform specific code away from the rest of your application functionality.

No one said that. They said that the price of NAND based storage will drop to be competitive with HDDs, but I suspect that there's an unspoken assumption there of HDDs staying static... in other words, NAND storage in a few years will be equivalent to the price per GB of HDDs now.

Even if NAND storage reaches price parity with HDDs, there will probably remain markets for both, since they have different performance behavior for the lifetime of the device, sine NAND cells will die over time. On the other hand, if the price drop is significant enough to make NAND approach optical media in terms of price per GB, we might see the return of cartridge based game consoles, and the death of long load times and waiting while the game is copied to the console internal HDD.

No matter how great your local storage is, you can't carry *all the media*, meaning that at some point you have to pick the subset of media you want and transfer it over the network. There's nothing wrong with that, but I suspect that for the vast majority of consumers being able to browse and choose content at the time of watching will always be more convenient than trying to anticipate everything you're going to want to watch.