There was an interesting observation on the new Top Gear (UK) yesterday - Elon Musk isn't an idiot, he's built battery factories because he knows very well that when the big automakers of the world finally decide to make proper electric vehicles (including automation) then they'll completely destroy Tesla almost overnight. It's not a long term viable business, but that's fine because making cars is not the long term goal. It's all about making a demand for electric vehicles whilst ensuring he owns the factories that they'll rely on in the future. That's how he ends up making the really big bucks.

That was their theory anyway, up to you whether you agree or not, but interesting all the same.

Maybe this is just a problem with the latest Chrome beta (I haven't checked others) but it seems to display both EV and DV certificates in exactly the same way to me. On /. the certificate is issued by "Let's Encrypt Authority X3", therefore it's DV but on my bank's website it's "Symantec Class 3 EV" yet both of them display in the URL bar exactly the same way.

How is your average internet user supposed to know the difference when someone can get a DV for a phishing website that looks just like their bank website and the URL bar looks exactly the same (bar the easily-missed URL difference)?

I checked PayPal as well and that shows the URL bar differently (with PayPal, Inc. in the green box) even though that's also "Symantec Class 3 EV", so there seems to be something odd going on there. To be honest, even with that, I don't think the average user would know the difference between a green box containing "Secure" vs. the name of the company, they're just looking for that green box/padlock.

You'd think that, but I very recently got a Google Now card right at the top of the list (ahead of weather etc. whereas that's normally the very top) which told me Nicki Minaj had a new album out. I've never listened to, searched for, bought or in any way shown an interest in that, and I've never been alerted to any band that I do actually listen to/search for having a new album out.

It was immediately obvious that was 'sponsored content' and probably pushed out to millions of people, right on their home screen and right at the top where they can't miss it. If that's the kind of shit they want to start pulling, I'll stop using Google Now. It'd be a real shame as well because it actually finds things I genuinely am interested in every day

You're right, 150 times per year at 3+ hours per sex session is completely normal and practical for the average American, as the study clearly shows. How foolish of me to think that wasn't the case. In other news, people who drink 40 beers a night 150 times a year are just having a great time!

Unless of course, I was right when I said that 3+ hours was just a huge outlier. Here's the Wikipedia page backed by a medical study which found that median time is 5.4 minutes of penetration (3.4 minutes for over 50s). Of course that's only the penetration part, but if you're spending 3 hours on 'the rest' then I'd hardly call that having sex for 3 hours. If you spend 40 minutes warming up, run for 10 minutes and spend 40 minutes stretching afterwards you can't really say you ran for an hour and a half.

Congratulations to the OP on enjoying himself, but for me if I can run a marathon faster than I can have sex, that's just too long. I wouldn't be enjoying myself after even half that time and I'd just be going through the motions for some kind of macho claim that I can. 40-60 minutes from start to finish is just fine for me.

I'm very happy with my sex life, but thanks for going straight for the strawman and ad hominem all-in-one.

I know exactly what I'm saying: that spending 3 hours on average having sex every single time is just so far to the right of the bell-curve it can't even see the middle any more. That's also not accounting for sex being off-the-table 1 week out of every 4 for most men in monogamous relationships, plus things like times when you are ill, one of you is away without the other (e.g. a business trip) or if you are working different shifts. If you factored all that in, the average would be north of 4 hours in a single session every single time every other day.

Try working an 8 hour day plus commute time, fulfilling your basic needs (like eating, washing and sleeping) and potentially those of your children, doing chores and then find the time and energy for a 4 hour romp... There literally aren't enough hours in the day for the average person to do that.

You better not have any other hobbies or interests either or you'll have no chance of getting those 9 hours per week in and you will have failed at sex.

Averaging 150 times per year = ~3 times per week, so 9 hours per week = ~3 hours each time. That sounds more like an addiction instead of genuinely, fully enjoying that all the way through and just happening to take that amount of time. Very few people have 3 hours to spend 3 times a week after they've got home from their long day at work, got the kids fed, washed and asleep and tended to their own personal needs.

I'd look towards blaming long work hours, lower average pay and fast ubiquitous access to the Internet for the decline rather than people just not doing it right.

If he can't keep up with the queue of potential customers and he can't find good staff, it sounds like he needs automation then, surely?

What if they start the line with a single-line comment then a big splurge of random data to cause the collision? It'd still compile fine.

That's not really a fair comparison because your average Linux user and your average Windows users probably have very different skill sets when it comes to computers.

Your average Linux user probably installed it themselves and therefore admin their own PC. This makes them much more likely to have upgraded to a kernel >2.6. Your average Windows user got it pre-installed when they purchased their laptop/desktop and has absolutely no idea how to upgrade it. They'll stick with whatever it had when it first arrived and only upgrade when they get new hardware with a new version pre-installed.

The large Windows 7 install base also has to take into account the number of business users which are still buying brand new hardware (which probably comes with Win10) but then installing Windows 7 on it from some kind of image. Large companies take a very long time to upgrade to the latest version of even simple software, never mind an entire OS upgrade with all the regression testing that involves. My last company had over 60,000 employees worldwide and was just rolling out a huge Windows 7 upgrade when Windows 8.1 had already been released!

Was I the only one left thinking this is a good thing, despite the article seeming to nudge towards the opposite?

A new standard came along, some people pointed out a problem with it so it wasn't adopted and now a better standard has come along which is unaffected by those problems but retains the original benefits.

Ermmm, what's the problem?

This is an attitude that I see a lot and no doubt will come up multiple in times in this thread, and I've got to say - I just don't get it.

When Gnome 3 came out I hated it as well so I switched to Xfce and I've been happy with that. I didn't rant and rave about the Gnome guys though because the way I see it, they're volunteers. The attitude above is tinged with a real sense of entitlement like they owe you something, but they absolutely don't.

I'm sorry that you don't like their changes, I didn't either. However, it's not their responsibility to do things the way you want. These guys have an offering and they're competing with a number of others. It's up to you to either pick the one that most suits you (which will never provide with you with a perfect fit) or make your own solution that does things exactly as you like it. You can then make it available to the public and who knows other people might use it as well!

How will you feel when they tell you that they want you to change it do something else though but you don't want to go that way? You'd be well within your rights to say "I'm a volunteer, this is the way I want to go, if you don't like it then I'm sorry but take a look at one of our competitors".

You are perfectly entitled to ask them to do things differently and try to influence the future direction but if they don't agree with you, sorry but they're the guys writing the code so they'll do it the way they think is right. If they get that wrong too many times then nobody will use their product and people will flock to the better alternatives. That's the beauty of open source.

How can you genuinely consider switching to Microsoft in response to this - how much choice do they give you exactly?

If you need to read 1GB of data off disk (say, loading a game or something) wouldn't you use exactly the same amount of CPU power whether you load it at 40MB/s or 400MB/s? Either way all of that data needs reading from storage and 'processing', why does reading it slower mean it takes less power?

If anything I would've thought and SSD takes less power overall because you can wake up the full CPU, do any processing and then put it back into a low-power mode. If you're streaming data slowly you need to keep at least 1 core active to handle the stream.

The old iPhones/iPods/iPads don't cease to exist just because Apple brings out a new one. There is an absolutely enormous installed base of "old" resolutions out there that might still buy your apps, so you can't just start ignoring them. If you want to develop an iOS app you now need to consider whether you accept your app being run in "black bars" mode on the new phone (almost certainly not), or handle the fact that resolution changes depending on which device your app is installed on. I haven't looked at the API so I don't know how much of a PITA that may or may not be, but it definitely needs to be taken into account. The fragmentation is not nearly as bad as on Android, but it definitely exists and needs to be catered for.

Were they testing each distribution on exactly the same hardware?

If so, that sounds completely fair to me that it would be slower. Go and (try to) install Vista on a machine that originally came with XP (pre-SP1) and see how much slower it is. Is that a fair test either? I think not.

As software gets more useful (and Ubuntu has, Vista not so much) it gets bigger and thus gets slower on the same hardware. Hardware advances at the same time though, so in real terms they keep about equal. When you test new software on old hardware of course it's going to be slower though.