cpleppert

>>Far as the argument, it's weak because none of the claims they made last time came true. If anything, the U.S. is spying on and locking up so many Americans they might need to cut back so they can stop putting dangerous people back on the street.

Most of the increase in prison occupancy is due to drug offenses and this has been dropping since 2008ish; not due to 'spying'

>>Prosecution is so one-sided in FBI's favor that plea bargain rate is 97%.

This is 97% of the 92% of cases that are not dismissed or dropped by the prosecution after charges are filed. So only about 89% of the cases brought by federal prosecutors are resolved by a plea bargain. This also covers cases that are not brought or investigated by the FBI at all. The vast majority of criminal cases brought by prosecutors are slam-dunks(after all, they wouldn't charge someone otherwise). You don't need to believe the FBI in any case. Most criminal cases around the world are resolved very quickly and with a high conviction rate for the prosecution.

>> Yes, it can, and I explained exactly how in the original post. It's true I got some of the technical details wrong, but the substance of the post was and is correct

No you were wrong. You claimed that if the FBI was competent they could retrieve the key from the flash. There were no technical details discussed at all. (you could trivially google this issue and find out what you suggested doesn't work)

The ACLU is describing an attack on the PIN not the key. You acknowledge this in another comment on this thread so I have no idea why you are claiming here that the FBI can get past the encryption in any way; which as others have said doesn't work.

That isn't what you said:

>> It's encrypted, but here's the thing: the encryption key is also (almost certainly) stored in the same chip. So all the FBI needs to do is de-solder the chip, mount it in its own hardware, and read out the data.

This is not correct and was the main suggestion you made.

>> I don't know how I could have made it any clearer that I was proposing an attack on the PIN, not the key.

Because you just did. You are now claiming that an offhand comment you made that resembles what the ACLU suggests is the main point of your post and that is not the case.

What do you expect to have happen? Sync to multiple itunes libraries? How exactly do you expect that to work?

Besides the technical issues it would be a complete user interface nightmare when dealing with storage issues on the device.

There are a lot of different streaming music services available too(not to mention you can stream your itunes purchases too.) If you are manually managing your music where you expect songs to magically move from one computer to another through an iphone you might consider finding a different solution than complaining that apple doesn't magically solve your problem.

I agree, I think the author is confusing mandatory monetary compensation for FISA/warrants etc with just straight up paying for a company to comply. Companies don't want to be paid especially because the monetary gains aren't worth it and the reputation risks are enormous.

There is no difference between refusing unanimous consent and a filibuster. Reid just changed the cloture requirement to 51 from 60.

>>as they passed the ACA, they simply changed to rules to use the reconciliation process

No they passed the bill with 60 votes during the only time they actually had a supermajority. There were no rules changes needed or required. ACA was passed and signed before changes were made in the reconciliation process.

Seems really hard to just reject all the new features because you don't like the window chrome.

Unlike the author, I have no issues running Yosemite on an i7 macbook pro retina with a 27' inch thunderbolt external display.

I think the CPU story is pretty reasonable this console generation. You trade single thread performance for a more powerful and space efficient design. It is just a lot easier to optimize the CPU than the GPU especially running on a gaming focused platform so console makers always trade CPU for extra graphics power.

Right, and I'm saying that the data dependency limitations alone in general purpose code pose an upper limit on how much instruction level parallelism can be extracted from the instruction stream. You simply can't make use of execution resources if they need to wait on the results of another one.

EDIT: I'm not even considering pipelining, latency or transferring data among execution units, just assume every instruction completes in one cycle and makes its result available instantly.

>>Alas, it looked good on paper, but died in practice, either because the theory was flawed (but academic simulations seemed to suggest it would be a win), or because Sun didn't have the resources to invest in it properly and Oracle killed it.

I heard this never actually worked at all and they added the ability to turn off the hardware scout entirely before canceling it. I'm not really sure how the scout was supposed to be able to help performance. If the algorithm is indirect heavy then speculatively running it won't help you. On the other hand, if it isn't you might as well rely on conventional prefetch. Do you have a link to those studies?

>> If it turns out you have to actually restructure your code to get this 2.3x performance, rather than gcc-recompile with a different architecture, then it's not really an apples-to-apples speedup.

Right, I would only add that the algorithm itself has to be amenable to that architecture in the first place. Most general purpose code isn't and won't be able to take advantage of a large number of parallel execution resources.

>>All of which is to say, I think the 10x they're talking about is unrealistic.

I think that is putting it mildly and is a little strange to somehow claim in the first place. That can't possibly be true, their isn't room for a 10X increase in optimization on an Intel core chip and would be impossible to reach based on memory bandwidth and the amount of execution resources available on a chip alone. The ideas they have concretely put forth simply don't work or don't really provide a performance increase.

Take their virtual memoryless implementation. Getting rid of virtual memory doesn't buy you a whole lot especially when you need to add in a protection mechanism that looks a lot like a TLB in the first place(and must have the same general properties to provide protection, you just gain very marginal lookup costs).

If you do the math, this can't add more than 1-2% in performance in common application software at the cost of making every modern operating system unusable and increasing memory consumption(embedded systems anyone?). If getting rid of virtual memory was so great, why didn't someone do it in every other preceding clean room architecture? My answer: It isn't.

Or consider how they want to do branch prediction: add a separate ISA to do static branch prediction that is added by the compiler and loaded asynchronously by another cpu component and then supplied to the main cpu.

First of all, this doesn't work. The CPU can't have performance critical data pushed to it by another component. There is a reason the Branch prediction table and branch target buffers are small and focused and able to be accessed quickly. Secondly, static branch prediction is awful. You simply must be able to modify branch prediction data as the CPU executes to provide optimum performance. So it seems they want to be more power hungry, more complex, and have less performance than a mainstream CPU when it comes to branch prediction.

It is possible I have misinterpreted some elements of this scheme but basic design decisions like putting branch prediction into a separate component of the CPU simple don't make sense at all from a chip layout perspective.

Finally, I'm not really sure where the performance is supposed to come from with the 'belt' in the first place. Data dependency is incredibly complex in a modern pipelined cpu and while it is possible to reduce the cost by precompiling software for an optimized CPU the benefits are all very low level and really don't extend beyond reduced power consumption(assuming compilation cost can be amortized). At some point, to get more instruction level parallelism you simply have to bite the bullet and do dynamic out of order scheduling in the CPU to extract more performance. This has a well defined cost and an upper level limitation on how much total parallelism a CPU can extract from an instruction stream. Think of it another way: a static compiler has less information than a running CPU so one can't expect it to be able to extract more parallelism than the CPU itself.

The margin on the top of the line Macbook pro that he got(1TB and 2.6ghz quad) is just insane. For an extra $700 you are increasing the SSD to a capacity you will never use and moderately increasing CPU clock. If you really need a 1TB drive you are going to go external anyway. You might as well go with the stock $2600 configuration as RAM limits are far more significant.

On the lower end there is little value anyway too as you are losing the integrated graphics, 8GB of memory and reducing the drive capacity to 256gb which might matter more if you have a lot of media. You might as well get the 13inch pro at that price and get a more portable laptop to boot.

I find Ctrl to be a far better modifier key for window movement actions. BetterSnapTool FTW

The abstract mentions no control group at all and the only number mentioned was the amount of people on antidepressants who took the survey. Additionally, no claim of statistical relevance was made and all the results are simply reported from the survey.

So likely there is no control group.

Russia guaranteed the territorial integrity of Ukraine without exceptions when the Soviet Union collapsed. And yes, that includes the Crimean peninsula.

>>Knowing the SCO took me from 800 to 1600.

Thats absolutely ridiculous and SCO is a poor reference anyway. There are a lot of good opening books that cover specific openings to ever rely on an a comprehensive guide anyway.

I'll a little confused that you claim to 'know' it. You reviewed the entire book even if you don't play certain openings or defenses? There is a lot better use of your time.

>>It's how a beginner becomes an intermediate player.

No it isn't. Having a good grasp of chess tactics makes you an intermediate player. So what if you memorize opening lines? Your intermediate opponent isn't going to follow them at all.

>>neither Net Applications' nor Stat Counter's samples are random.

Then they have no statistical relevance. None. You can't make up for not having a random sample by having more results.

>>They are also not truly random samples, but they are different for each poll--which helps.

They are very close to random samples, which can be proved statistically after an election.

I use Safari solely because of this reason. It would cost me too much time to remember/retype all of my passwords, especially if it is a intranet type application that demands a password seemingly time I get a link and won't stay logged in for a reasonable time.

>>As for "dark rotten times", in the 20's Stalin was talking to English ambassador who asked Stalin if there would be a world war and Stalin replied that there would be a war and it would be much worse as with Germany, Japan would also attack from the east.

Your arguing the 'purge' was prescient foresight on the part of stalin who ignored warnings that Hitler was going to attack and kept troops that could have been used against the Germans stationed in Siberia against the Japanese? Stalin didn't know war was coming and said so. The purges led to massive early losses by the Red Army at the hands of incompetent generals.

>>: the on-chip cache is much quicker than conventional architectures as the TLB is not on the critical path

I would really like to know your reasoning that the TLB is a major bottleneck in conventional CPUs. CPUs execute a TLB lookup in parallel with the cache, so there is usually no latency except on a TLB miss.

Basic research on in-memory databases suggest eliminating the TLB would improve performance only by about 10%, this certainly isn't a realistic use case and most of the benefits can be obtained simply by using larger pages. So I don't really know where your claims about 25% fewer reads is coming from in relation to simply getting rid of virtual memory.

>>If I was in charge of Windows that is likely what I would do. Make Windows for Desktop and Windows for Touch, with starkly different UIs and designs, but with some emulation layer so people can run a touch app on the desktop (in like a sandbox window)

Emulation layers don't work; if your operating system needs to emulate needed applications no one is going to use it. Microsoft already has a touch optimized OS: Windows Phone, just port it to tablets. Easy. Done. Of course then it has to compete with iOS and Android on its merits and not because it has Office and can interface with the windows ecosystem and can kinda run desktop applications.

>>it's impossible to prove either intelligent design or evolution because neither is reproducible.

I don't even know where to begin..... If that was the case science could tell us nothing about anything that isn't perfectly reproducible.

I have never had this happen on my iPhone but my iPad randomly does this if the battery is low and I have just begun loading a web page. Surprisingly, youtube never poses any issue so it doesn't seem to have anything to do with the amount of data being retrieved. I'm wondering if the sudden network activation as I click on a link causes some power management bug in the OS.

>> AFAICT, Win 8 is an all-around improvement except for basically one highly-visible but trivially correctable UI decision for keyboard-centric devices.

Requiring a non-supported hack to get around a central design decision doesn't work for the vast majority of users who expect it to just work. This highly visible UI decision is the whole point behind windows 8 and is central to the way Microsoft wants you to interact with the OS. If you aren't using the metro/modern apps there is no point in windows 8.

The 'improvements' are very modest over windows 8 and none of them have anything to do with the way the vast majority of users expect to be able to use the desktop. You still need to get into windows 8 stuff to perform basic tasks like changing settings or shutting down the computer(! yes, i am aware of other ways to do it but the average user is stuck). I still find the magic corner stuff like the charms bar in windows 8 to be totally jarring and strange and I am very technically proficient.

Unless Firefox OS is going to add additional APIs that make essentially make web applications proprietary I'm not sure what your point is. The problems with HTML5 development for mobile applications are well known and are the result of an impedance mismatch between the document model and the native controls that the user expects to use on the platform. Simply trying to replicate a native application rapidly introduces complexity which isn't helped by the generally slow performance of DOM interactions with javascript on slower mobile platforms.

Do you think that every vendor purposely downgrades the mobile experience(even vendors like samsung which don't have a reason to favor native vs. web apps)? It doesn't make sense to blame mobile safari, chrome, and ie mobile when google, apple and Microsoft put a lot of resources into their development.

> Adaptative search does not look like a marketplace, it looks like a search engine. There is a marketplace icon that launches the marketplace app which has a experience similar to other app stores.

The reviewer was probably right to be confused as it isn't clear from basic descriptions of the OS exactly how it works. Instead, there is buzzword fluff (HTML5! HTML5!) and marketing jargon about the 'web'. I am very technical and I still am not clear about how firefox os applications work. Are there additional APIs available to applications from the marketplace? Are applications downloaded by the launcher or does every application act like a web link, or is there a combination of the two?

Even worse:

>>“We were probably floating in contaminated water without knowing it for a day and a half before we got hit by that plume,” said Cooper, whose career as a third-class petty officer ended five months after the disaster for health reasons. The toxic seawater was sucked into the ship’s desalinization system, flowing out of its faucets and showers — still radioactive — and into the crew member’s bodies.

Toxic seawater a hundred miles offshore???? You can't make up anything more ridiculous.

Right, the notion it turned away an aircraft carrier a hundred miles away from fukushima is ridiculous.