I totally agree with you bruh! The threat of terrorism only justified the suspension of habeas corpus and the indefinite detention of filthy foreigners. China virus is at least a couple orders of magnitude scarier so suspending habeas corpus and the indefinite detention of Americans is totally justified! Who cares about due process and rule of law when you're so scared, right?!

Fear is the tyrant's best friend, I would have thought that would have been obvious after 9/11, instead we have big brains like yourself trying to rationalize their quivering in their own urine with some body count math. Fucking pathetic.

Yep, just like with the government interference necessary to stop terrorism

Lmfao, you wind and solar shills are hilarious. Look, E=mc^2 you stupid mother fucker, there's orders of magnitude more energy available in the nucleus of an atom than the electron field. To suggest your dumb ass chemical energy schemes come even close is beyond stupid.

Hopefully you smooth brained window lickers will do some fucking research stop rehashing your ignorant anti-nuke bullshit. Uneducated idiots like you are the reason we're still dealing with fossil fuels and the problems they bring.

Conservative estimates put the death toll from democide - governments killing their own people - in the 20th century at around 200 million people. This includes both intentional acts of murder and genocide, was well as acts of gross incompetence, but doesn't include war - which has resulted in many millions more dead. This isn't just those evil nazis and commies either, the western 'good guy' governments we all know and love have contributed plenty to this death toll.

A specific example of government incompetence literally killing people is the FDA and the AIDS epidemic of the 80s and 90s. The government 'helping' patient safety resulted in the early deaths of many thousands of patients by denying them access to life saving drugs that were yet to be approved. See the movie 'Dallas Buyer's Club'. But the AIDS case is just one example as there are many others, but as with all unseen opportunity costs, the harm just the FDA has caused can never be quantified.

But of course the biggest threat to our privacy is the government itself. I guess we all forget about the Snowden revelations, but they spy on us more than any corporation, and use that data for far more nefarious purposes, yet you expect us to trust them to protect our privacy? Yeah, I have a bridge to sell you...

Look, the only thing governments have consistently done well is kill and destroy. That they throw you a few feel good scraps, protecting you from evils of Google and Facebook, should be no excuse to pretend they're a force for good when they're simultaneously slaughtering poor brown people by the hundreds of thousands.

Are you saying it takes the same level of convincing you to get you to spend money as it does to convince you to condone mass murder? That those two things are some how in the same universe?

Yeah, one convinces you to buy shit you don't need. The other convinces you there's nothing wrong with slaughtering hundreds of thousands of people on the other side of the globe with drone strikes and forced starvation. That you think there is some moral equivalence between the two shows how effective the state's propaganda machine is.

Oh boohoo, your cable company might inconvenience you slightly! But who gives a shit about the hundreds of thousands of people the US government has slaughtered in the Middle East in your name? I guess their lives don't matter as much because they're poor and brown and you don't have to see their corpses piled high on your (propaganda) news networks? As long as your monthly mass murder service fee conveniently comes out of your paycheck you simply don't care.

But please, go back to telling us about your first world problems; the total lack of empathy from stereotypical entitled Americans is simply breath taking.

You may very well be correct that Meltdown doesn't apply to AMD, but my concern is everyone's level of certainty about that isn't grounded in anything concrete at this point, at least nothing I've been able to find. The actual Meltdown research paper said it may still be possible with more effort and I don't recall anything saying they were immune, so it seems to me the certainty behind this claim is based entirely on trust in AMD's word. They may have a very good reason for their claim, but unless I see an actual explanation from them as to why, I can't help but have some doubt about what's going on inside that black box.

I think this is where we disagree since I'd argue it is the problem - letting an attacker execute their own instructions with protected data is the leak, the side channel is secondary. While the implementations discussed in the papers did use a specific cache side channel attack, they also mentioned using other methods that didn't depend on the cache. A channel could be as little as 1 bit of detectable state information that persists after the roll back. Even out of band signals like temperature or EM field could potentially be used. Depending solely on this roll back to be air tight just seems crazy to me.

Honestly, until a given CPU with OoOE can be demonstrated to not do this, I can't help but consider it susceptible to Meltdown and think it's only a matter of time before someone gets it working. That someone may not be nice and let us know about it though. Hopefully I'm wrong, but I'd rather enable KTPI wherever I can at the moment.

As for why would AMD mislead? They may not be, they may sincerely believe they are immune, but without an explanation why, you're still blindly trusting their judgement and this wouldn't be the first time engineers missed a hole in their own product.

For real. This has shown that these code monkeys know zero about computer architecture. This isn't a flaw in an implementation, this is a flaw in a fundamental principle of CPU design.

I'm worried about this 'AMD is safe' bullshit that's been floating around. No, the Meltdown paper specifically says AMD has the same problem - out of order execution of instructions accessing protected memory - they just couldn't get the side channel to work and suggest it may just need some optimization. That doesn't mean AMD is immune, it just means they haven't gotten it working - yet.

Meltdown and Spectre depend on the CPU working as intended, and that's the problem. As the papers point out, everyone has long been focused on CPU performance but we may need to accept giving up some of that performance for more security.

That's not at all true. Spectre can most certainly access memory from other processes, including on AMD.

What they are referring to is Meltdown, which is specifically a privilege escalation exploit that allows a user process to access kernel memory from within it's own virtual memory space. Spectre, on the other hand, tricks another process to leak it's protected memory.

Even then, the Spectre paper specifically mentions how it may be possible to use it to access privileged memory by targeting an interrupt or syscall.

And AMD may very well turn out to be vulnerable to Meltdown too. While the researchers weren't able to get their PoC working on AMD CPUs, they did show that they *do* out of order execute instructions following an illegal memory access and discuss the problem may just be a matter of optimizing the side channel method they used.

Honestly I think AMD is being very dishonest in their announcement, beyond just the Meltdown handwaving. They claim the Spectre bounds check bypass has been fixed with software, but I haven't heard of a good software solution to this, much less have I seen an actual patch. Then they claim the Spectre branch target injection isn't an issue, but my understanding is this is just a matter of figuring out how to better mistrain AMDs branch prediction, as was done with Intel's.

These vulns are much more difficult to develop than your typical software vulns, and the researchers have barely even scratched the surface. There's sure to be much more to come and AMDs claims to be largely immune are horribly irresponsible. Until they disclose their actual reasoning behind their claims, I'm going to assume they're full of shit and just as vulnerable as everyone else.

I doubt this is true. A very large part of the costs of bringing a medical product to market comes from seeking regulatory approval - this is on the order of hundreds of millions of dollars to approve a single drug for a single use, regardless if it'll go on to treat more than 100 million people or less than 100. It takes billions of dollars worth of dedicated capital to get these approvals and pharma companies conveniently have just that - it's almost like it's a barrier to entry that was created by the FDA to protect these companies from competition...

Also understand these universities make out very well from this whole arrangement. In my experience, the universities that develop these drugs are the ones that actually hold the patents and the pharma companies only license them, paying the institution royalties in return. This means the university doesn't have to risk investing in further trials that might fail, while also recouping at least some of the cost of their research even if it does.

Even if we assume this expensive approval process is necessary for patient safety rather than being yet another example of revolving door corporatism, you'd still want such agreements as universities simply are not geared to bring a compound from the lab to the open market. This is called specialization; leave the science to the scientists and industrial production to the industrialists.

Frankly, I think as long as your doctor is sure you understand the risks involved and it is in your best interest, you should be allowed to buy a drug without FDA approval. This would make treatments for rare diseases like this far cheaper and more available as trial data could be collected over time without such a massive outlay. It would also enable smaller companies to take on promising compounds for rare conditions that have been passed over by big pharma. Obviously this means significantly more risk to the patient, but that risk may be worth it to someone with blindness or a terminal illness, and it should be up to them and them alone to make that subjective determination.

But this would never happen as it'd result in more competition for big pharma and less quid pro quo for those in the FDA.

And just about everyone who earns a wage, since many do not get raises that accurately reflect real inflation. Shit, I haven't even got raises to cover the bullshit low ball official inflation rate that these crooks publish - I don't know about you but the price of a hamburger has gone up a lot more in the past 10 years than my income.

I just can't comprehend how people can defend a system that *by design* quietly steals wealth from the economy to funnel it into bankers pockets and fund the endless bombing of shitty little countries on the other side of the globe. This artificial credit creation has been critical to funding the growth of the American empire and the millions of people it has slaughtered, all while making bankers stupid rich, yet there are people who actually defsystem. It's fucking sickening. There's nothing good about currency debasement, it most certainly steals wealth from the rest of the economy and funnels it to those closest to the central bank, and has been a mainstay of brutal empires in their final chapter throughout history.

Also, one of the main points of a fixed monetary inflation currency like BTC is that you can just stash it away and not have to worry about investing your savings if you don't want to. The need for every working stiff to be a speculator just to keep their retirement savings from losing value is insane and has played a major role in fueling these repeated asset bubbles. Using a decentralized currency like BTC as the basis of our monetary system would be far better for anyone who isn't a banker, politician, or defense contractor.

And the war on drugs has been an absolute disaster that has had little to no impact on reducing usage while greatly increasing harm. Instead of people taking much safer commercially manufactured opiates we have people dying left and right from illicitly manufactured fentanyl smuggled in from China. Likewise, ecigs are an amazing harm reduction method, that while they may have their own risks, they are undeniably better than traditional cigarettes. Trying to forcibly manipulate human behavior through legislation at best doesn't work, and at worst has resulted in some of the greatest human rights violation of our time.

$7.2 billion, eh? With the amount of billions the tech sector has been tossing around it's almost as if dollars grow on printing presses...

This bubble popping is going to be spectacular.

Nonsense. You're still thinking with a 20th century mind. We're not that far off from being able to launch autonomous drones into space to harvest the asteroid belt and construct a dyson swarm - it's now more of an engineering challenge than a science challenge. As long as you get your materials outside the gravity well of a planet like Earth, constructing massive space based living platforms would be relatively trivial. No need to travel anywhere to be able to reach a carrying capacity many times that of Earth. And assuming we're never able to reach speeds greater than a fraction of the speed of light, we can still hop from star system to star system until we have engulfed every star in the galaxy. Even if we reproduced at premodern rates, we'd be more limited by the age of the galaxy than any carrying capacity we couldn't engineer around. But, as the standard of living increases and people find other sources of enjoyment in life, the rate of reproduction has dropped below 2 per couple. The galaxy is just so massive and our capabilities are so limitless that over population will never be a wide spread problem, as has been demonstrated time and time again.