They'll provide ISPs with cache engines for their content. That way, it doesn't use near as much bandwidth. Their content gets pushed to the cache engine, and that streams to the customer. It is win-win since both the ISP -and- Netflix get to use less bandwidth.

So it isn't like the ISPs can whine that Netflix is just too heavy a load. They can get cache engines and call it good. Netflix even picks up the cost of said cache engines near as I know.

Cox does this. They've had fast streaming and "super HD" for a long time because they have Netflix cache engines. Comcast is just being greedy.

Hardware costs money. If you want cheap consoles, you have to trade things off. For example my PC has no problems rendering games like Titanfall at 60fps, even at resolutions beyond 1080 (2560x1600 in my case). So, just put that kind of hardware in a console right? Ya well, my GPU alone costs near double what a current console does, never mind the supporting hardware. It isn't feasible to throw that level of hardware at a console, it just costs too much.

That kind of thing has been tried in the past and it never worked. Remember the Neo-Geo? Had real arcade hardware (back when arcade units had better hardware than home systems) in it, far and above its contemporaries. However with a price equivalent to about $1100 today compared to its competitors which were about $350 in today's dollars it did very poorly.

The console makers had to make tradeoffs, and price was a big concern. Hence the somewhat limited hardware. Basically consoles are for people on a budget. They want something that plays games, but doesn't break the bank. So, the hardware in it has to be scaled accordingly. For those that want performance and are willing to for over more coin, the PC market is happy to oblige.

I'm not sure I agree on the honesty thing either. I see all types. Some are extremely honest, some are shady as hell. Heck we have some professors that basically just milk tenure. They don't teach, don't research, just sit around and collect a paycheck because it is too difficult to fire them. It really runs the gamut.

Because prison sucks and they'll usually seize any assets that they can prove were from the crime. So that's a pretty good reason not to do it.

Oh, and there's the whole "being a moral person" thing. Some people care about that too.

I like working in an academic environment, but getting shit done isn't the strong suit, particularly standards. You get a bunch of faculty on a committee and it'll take years to decide what to call the damn thing.

Just saying that the claim that the reason the IETF can't move fast is because of corporations as opposed to academics is silly.

You can hate on corporate types for various thing, but anyone who acts like academics know how to get anything done has never worked in academia. I work at a university and fuck me do we spend ages spinning our wheels, having meeting after endless meeting, discussing shit to death, and finally doing things 10 years after they needed to be done.

Speed is not what you find in an academic environment.

So they are a bit different, hardware wise. A big difference is unified memory. There is only one pool of memory which both the CPU and GPU access. That's makes sense since the CPU and GPU are also on the same silicon, but it is a difference in the way you program. Also in the case of the Xbone they decided to use DDR3 RAM, instead of GDDR5, which is a little slow for graphics operations, but the APU (what AMD calls the CPU/GPU combo chips) has 32MB of high speed embedded RAM on it to try and buffer for that.

Ok so there are some differences. However that aside, why the problem with the target? Visual quality. Basically, a video card can only do so much in a given time period. It only can push so many pixels/texels, only run so many shaders, etc. So any time you add more visual flair, it takes up available power. There's no hard limit, no amount where it stops working, rather you have to choose what kind of performance you want.

For example if I can render a scene with X polygons in 16ms then I can output that at 60fps. However it also means that I can render a scene of 2X polygons in about 33ms, or 30fps.

So FPS is one tradeoff you can make. You don't have to render at 60fps, you can go lower and indeed console games often do 30fps. That means each frame can have more in it, because the hardware has longer to generate it.

Another tradeoff is resolution. Particularly when you are talking texture related things, lowering the output resolution lowers the demand on the hardware and thus allows you to do more.

So it is a tradeoff in what you think looks best. Ya, you can design a game that runs at 1080p60 solid. However it may not look as good overall as a game that runs at 720p30 because that game, despite being lower FPS and rez, has more detail in the scenes. It is a choice you have to make with limited hardware.

On the PC, we often solve it by throwing more hardware at the problem, but you can't do that on a console.

Why the heck is ASL not American English? Perhaps there is a good reason, but it just seems silly to me, and it seems like something that would make it that much harder for someone who is hearing impaired to interact with those that are not. The fact that it is a different format is not a reason. I mean written and spoken English are very different formats, and do not have a direct 1-1 mapping in terms of things like letters to phonemes and so on, but yet they are exceedingly similar. I fail to see why this couldn't be done with ASL. Yes, you are going to want to have signs that represent words, rather than letters or phonemes. No problem, however syntax, grammar, structure, etc should all be the same as spoken or written English.

Our student at work has a plan that is like $30-40/month or something that is unlimited data (I don't remember how much high speed, they throttle at some point), 400 talk minutes and unlimited text. It's a prepaid deal.

I mean yes, there are expensive Android devices. You can have a nice, premium, phone or tablet if you wish. I loves me my Galaxy Note 3 but it certainly costs a lot, more than an iPhone even. However there are also cheap Android devices. You can get a smart phone for $100 or less (talking full price here, not subsidized). So Android phones are an option on most budgets.

Until recently, all you could get with Apple was the standard iPhone which is like $600-700 full price. Even the new "c" model is $550 full price. That puts them out of range of most people who want prepaid phone plans, which is often what people with lower incomes go for.

Well those people are also likely to spend less on apps. After all, if your finances are such that you wish to buy an economical phone, you probably don't want to ruin it with spending a ton of money on software.

So ya, that will push the average down on Android phones. Personally, I see that as a big positive to Android. There's something to be said for a thing that can be available to a wide segment of the population. Exclusivity to the affluent isn't something I consider to be positive.

I know a lot of people, my sister included, who have a big issue with taking drugs prescribed by a doctor, but no issue with taking drugs purchased from a dealer. The logic can be pretty strange. For example I was talking with her about looking in to trying an anti-anxiety medication. My family all has issues with that, but she is far worse than the rest of us. My parents and I take low doses of SSRIs for it and it seems to help a lot. Thus it would probably be worth a try for her, since we have a great deal of genetic commonalities so the chances it works on her are high. Her response? "I don't want to do that, I only want to take the drugs I choose." I pointed out to her that it was completely my choice to take an SSRI, I could stop any time I wished, they aren't addictive, there is no court or medical order that requires me to take it, I continue to take it because I find it useful. Same reason we all take allergy medicine in the spring: It is useful in dealing with that, not because there is a requirement of some kind. She didn't like that though, to her it is different, though she could not articulate how or why.

I'm not sure why it is such an issue, perhaps because of the stigma associated with mental health issues, but I've seen it in numerous occasions. People who have no issue with recreational drugs that alter your brain chemistry but think that prescription drugs that do the same are evil or bad or something. It is, as you point out, a very silly position. I can respect, though not agree with, the position of taking no drugs that alter brain chemistry for whatever reason. However it is silly to be ok with THC and LSD and the like, but not with an SSRI.

Now please don't anyone mistake me for saying "Everyone should take SSRIs." No, not at all. However if a professional suggests they, or another drug, may be useful to treating a condition you have, you shouldn't say "No I won't take drugs," but then go out and smoke a joint. That is just silly. That would be like then refusing to use marijuana if a doctor prescribed it.

Google up on articles on the Lazarus Doctor (he works on patients who have nominally died of hypothermia) and on the new experimental saline blood substitute for potentially fatal injuries (the paramedics swap the patient's blood for the solution, deep-freeze the patient and reverse the process at hospital, eliminating all stress and trauma to the body in transit).

The theoretical duration you can perform suspended animation in real life is unknown, but is estimated to be many months.

The practical duration is only a few hours, so far.

The cost of improving on the practical duration (since the former method is really only limited by how long you can artificially keep O2 levels in the brain over 45%) is far, far less than the cost of a mission to Mars. Ergo, that is the logical solution. Fund medical research into the two methods. Put 100% of NASA funding for a manned Mars mission into those two techniques for at least the next couple of years.

That should accelerate development of the necessary technologies. By doing it this way, you need absolutely bugger all new rocketry technology. The N months food needed for the journey by live astronauts can be replaced with radiation shielding of the same total mass.

This leaves you with radiation on Mars. But only if you land on the surface. What you want to do is land in a deep narrow gorge or chasm. There are some, that is where the methane was reported. That increases the thickness of atmosphere, which is good for radiation. It is unexplored, which is even better. There is a chance of a cave network, absolutely ideal for looking for water, life and/or a good location for settlers.

Oh, and doing things this way improves life on Earth, the very thing all the anti-space people demand NASA prove they can do.

Everyone's happy, apart from, well, everyone. NASA doing a better job of health than the NIH will upset people. A workable mission will upset futurologists because the future will be done rather than talked about, putting them out of a job. Eliminating the radiation problem will infuriate the buggers who say the mission can't be done. Eliminating any issues with transit time mean you can launch the mission the day after the medical stuff is sorted, leaving those talking about a 2030-2050 timeframe looking as stupid as they really are.

So, yeah, it'll get the job done, but expect those involved in a mission to be lynched by a mob of respectable plutocrats.

Actually there are valid reasons for an electric vehicle to shift gears - just because many electric vehicles only have one gear doesn't mean there aren't valid reasons for having multiple gear ratios.

Although in the case of EVs, shifting tends to be more speed-dependent than load-dependent. While EV motors are typically constant-power, there ARE torque limits at low speeds due to current limits. Although this usually means that an EV that has more than one gear ratio needs far fewer than an internal combustion vehicle. (as in, even two gear ratios is usually enough in the rare cases where only one gear ratio wasn't.)

See Charles Guan's burnoutchibi project as one example.

Where I live, you can get cable Internet that is 150/20mbps. It has the backhaul to support it too, you really get those kind of speeds. I've a friend on the other side of the US with FIOS who has even faster, 150/65mbps again with the backhaul to support the speed.

This is in the US too. There are other countries that claim better.

I mean sure, they have fast FTTH. Fair enough, but that doesn't do you much good if the backhaul to the rest of the Internet isn't sufficient to support the speeds.

This is something that always gets left out of the "OMG t3h fast internetz!!!" articles on Slashdot. A lot of the "really fast" Internet in the world is basically a big WAN where you have a fast line, and thus fast speeds to your neighbors and ISP, but then lack the backhaul to get those kind of speeds to the wider Internet, since that's the really expensive part.

Not saying that's the case here or not, but it is the kind of info that needs to be included to be useful. Along with, of course, the actual speed.