salient

iTunes has a much larger userbase, though. Spotify actually generated half a billion last year alone.

What's not open about HSA? If Intel and Nvidia haven't joined it (yet) doesn't mean it's not open. Nvidia treats OpenCL as 2nd class citizen compared to CUDA anyway, and I don't think Intel is that interested in OpenCL anymore, now that they have Phi. So if neither party is too interested in OpenCL, then I'd rather have HSA than the actual proprietary CUDA/Phi solutions.

It's more like 1.5x difference now according to Distimo:

> Apple still has the most lucrative app store, with Distimo estimating that on a typical day in November 2013, global revenues for the 200 top grossing iOS apps were more than $18m. That compares to $12m for Android's Google Play store, although the report notes that a year ago, the respective figures were $15m and $3.5m. The gap is narrowing.

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/dec/18/android-io...

That GPU is 3x faster than the one in Xbox One. Also, if you cared so much about performance/price, you should've gotten a PS4, which has a performance to price ratio of 1.8:1 compared to the Xbox One (1.8 Gflops/$400 vs 1.2 Gflops/$500), and you can play all games at 1080p.

Android already existed before Google bought it, and at the time it was built mainly as a competitor to Blackberry (before Google bought them). So Google continued on the same path, as they were less interested in "changing the paradigm of mobile UX" than in killing the Real Fragmentation that existed before, with each OEM having its own OS, and unifying them under the open source Android.

There's something to be said about how fast they reacted to iPhone once they saw it, though. I mean how many big companies react as fast the moment they see a disruptive technology and realize its potential for the future? In comparison it took Nokia 4 years after the iPhone, to even admit Symbian was a dead-end, and it also took Microsoft 3 years to come up with something that wasn't just an evolution of Windows Mobile. So kudos to Google for realizing early on the potential of the iPhone-like user interfaces and iPhone-like touchscreen smartphones.

Wait for them to sell this as some sort of "collateral damage that we just have to accept", like the US gov is selling drone strikes, and NSA is trying to sell their "errors" when collecting data on Americans.

Does the Rust team take into account what AMD and ARM are trying to do with HSA? What about the changes in OpenCL 2.0? I think they should keep them in mind now before their Rust design spec is finalized, and if possible, try to optimize for them, too.

> This is marked change of course coming from white house

Is it really? The White House has already disagreed with one of the major changes proposed by this panel (which overall, I still think they are pretty limited, and don't go far enough) - separating NSA from the US Cyber Command.

I also care less about what the White House/Obama promises to change (not our first rodeo with this, is it?), and more about what Congress is going to change and what's going to make explicitly illegal.

Is this the panel led by former CIA, and being pre-approved by Clapper?

So just get rid of the internal combustion engine...Surely that energy could be used in a more efficient way - such as filling up batteries for electric cars, and then power 10x more electric cars than oil-based cars.

When it's 30+ percent of the world's transactions? Its market cap needs to be worth trillions before a highly stable price is established. When Bitcoin is truly mainstream and your grandma and grandpa will be having Bitcoin, and don't "panic sell" at every Bitcoin news, it's when Bitcoin's price will be stable.

Right now the market is full of people who buy and sell Bitcoin based on the latest news. Those people need to represent a tiny percentage of Bitcoin's market cap before volatility decreases drastically. Of course, when that happens, you shouldn't have major news like "China bans Bitcoin" anymore, since if so many people are using it, then you can assume the legal stuff has already been settled long ago, and most countries are using it, and won't ban it overnight anymore.

If you buy it right this minute - yes, it should grow a little more, and you can make a nice profit on it. But is $600+ the price it will stay at from now on? I'm not so sure. I think it will drop to $350 soon, because there's still a lot of uncertainty in the market right now, and there could be some more European countries coming out with bad news for Bitcoin in the next few weeks.

Too bad this didn't happen before the elections happened. Not that I wanted Romney to win, but at the very least it would've forced the Democratic party to offer some candidates, too, and with any luck, actual changes to NSA spying would've arrived earlier, if it would've been a major issue during the campaign, when everyone is watching the debates.

But now we have to put up with Obama's dismissal, since he doesn't have much to lose himself, short of impeachment (which I think is warranted, especially if the Supreme Court ends up declaring the mass spying unconstitutional).

> The Germans have received assurances that the chancellor's phone was not being monitored and that the US spy agency is not conducting industrial espionage.

Seriously? After admitting they spied on Petrobas and EU telecoms, "for their own safety"? They still can't get their story straight.

Also, the extent of Stasi spying vs NSA spying:

http://falkvinge.net/2013/07/05/stasi-vs-the-u-s-nsa-back-to...

Do we really need another Java-like language? I would think since web development is often an "entry level" for many beginning programmers, we need languages with prettier syntax and easier to grasp, something like Python.

So is it time to end the oil company subsidies, now, or is it still not the right time?

With any luck, this will be the last major step that will cause Facebook's fading into irrelevance.

I agree. As long as big companies become so good at tracking and making money through surveillance themselves, it's just too irresistible for spy agencies not to try and get that data one way or another.

That's why companies need to at least use forward secrecy, keep data at rest encrypted, and also delete more ephemeral data a lot more quickly.

Google used to delete the data they have on their users every 6 months. I don't think they plan on ever deleting anything they have anymore now. That's the wrong way to go about it. Tracking data should not exist for more than a few months at most, and private communications should not be held for more than a year. Of course, it would be so much easier for the user, if everything was end-to-end encrypted, and then it wouldn't need to be deleted.

> Not long ago they united under the PRISM project to spy on their users. What a quick change of heart.

Yes, but then they did it for your safety, and because they care about you. Now they're doing it because...well, they're starting to lose money.

That's no excuse. Democracies should stand up to democracy and human rights, not defend its "allies" at all costs - especially when said "allies" are backstabbing them by spying on every one of their citizens. That's why I think it's more cowardice than anything - or hypocrisy in the sense that they're just as bad, and would be just as bad as US in their situation, while pretending they aren't as bad right now.

So disappointed no EU government is willing to stand up against mass surveillance by actually giving him asylum. They're all a bunch of cowards and hypocrites. Brazil sounds like a pretty good place for him to be, though, and he'd be getting the chance to work closer with Greenwald, too.

So like an Wikipedia for news? You may be on to something there!

Prediction: Qualcomm wasn't actually ready to release an ARMv8 chip even at the end of 2014. They may try to do it now, but I don't think they were planning for it. From recent news it seems they were more interested in jumping on the "8-core" bandwagon (you'd think they learned their lesson when they rushed out their first quad core chip, the S4 Pro, in order to catch-up to everyone else and also have a "quad core chip", but no, they didn't).

So how do I figure this? Because their first 64-bit chip they've just announced a few days ago (Snapdragon 410) is an ARM one! That blew my mind. Why? Because Qualcomm licenses ARM's architecture in order to build its own cores, and that should mean that they are coming out with a next-gen core faster than ARM's "stock cores". And yet their very first 64-bit chip is based on ARM's stock cores?

That made it pretty obvious that Qualcomm was not prepared at all to make an ARMv8 chip, and I think it was mainly laziness, because of the nice position they enjoy in the Android market right now. They thought they could squeeze 3 years out of the 32-bit Krait, when normally it should've been two.

Well the joke is on them. I certainly won't buy any phone in 2014 that isn't 64-bit, since I usually change my phones every 2-3 years, and I don't want to buy one of the very last 32-bit phones.

I was actually expecting Qualcomm to release its own custom-made ARMv8 core early 2014 - and on 20nm! So I can't believe Qualcomm was actually going to rest on its laurels to such degree that they weren't even planning to switch to 64-bit, and probably 20nm either, even in 2014! That's insane, and only a company that thinks it has too much monopoly power in a market would do that.

As Andy Grove used to say - stay paranoid about your competition. A paranoid company would've expected at least to some degree Apple to release its first 64-bit chip this year. But they didn't even have to do that. They just had to follow the original plan. The one that says release a new core every 24 months, and on a new process node (the one ARM is also following). What ever happened to that plan?

I was just thinking today - we're about to start using "smart light-bulbs" in a few years. Lightbulbs with Internet connections, that can potentially record everything we say anywhere, even in real world (unless they are doing that already with idle cellphones).

If we don't stop this now, and don't make it explicitly illegal, and actually punish the people involved (otherwise they's no downside to continuing it), then it will get a lot worse in the future.

Also, how can US law be so asymmetrical? It's illegal to look into someone's mail, which just includes one single conversation, but it's not to look at someone's real-time conversations for a long time, which can include all sorts of topics, and then multiply that by millions of people.

If looking into just one mail conversation is illegal, how come mass surveillance isn't immediately seen as massively illegal?

Ok, how about the law that makes it a felony to lie to Congress. Let's start with that one!

Moxie are you communicating with the DarkMail guys at all? I'm sure they would appreciate your input.

If the government wasn't paying for tuitions like they are now, these prices formed by "supply and demand" would be much lower.

They are making a lot of bogus claims using marketing speak, and they are very low on details, while saying the app will be opensourced "eventually".

For a "security" app, hell yeah you should be skeptical. Right now I think the most interesting and most trustworthy secure messaging projects are TextSecure v2 and Dark Mail (granted, that one isn't even out yet, their ideas so far sounded quite good).

Look into this:

https://whispersystems.org/blog/advanced-ratcheting/

With great power comes great responsibility. I'm glad Snowden saw it that way, too. Same goes for William Binney who was a higher-up in NSA, and also in charge of creating some of its most important/dangerous surveillance software, before he decided to become a whistleblower.