We do not have calculators embedded because the procedure is high-risk and the benefit is pretty darn minor. Computers are very very good at complex math but still only a few people have the necessary brainpower to really understand mathemathical theories in order to do real work with, say, surface integrals or PDEs.

You should look at work being done with deaf and/or blind people to see real bleeding edge of wetware implants. Hearing implants are apparently already pretty good. They went from "hear something" to "hear people talk but bit wonky" in a decade or so.

The obvious huge difference here is that the implants are connected to I/O already present in the brain wetware and it's still extremely difficult to pull off.

Your calculator example would require completely artificial interface layer to the brain, which I do not see happening in a hurry. I do not think really getting brain wired is going to happen before we get a lot better in nanotech and biology and assume we do not get assimilated by gray goo.

Subvocalizing would be relatively straightforward to do, thought. You could have conversation with your implants hooked to your auditory nerve.

Soylent Green.

Living in a quasi-socialist EU nation, our social security is already taking this into account - My father went into retirement when he was 62 or somesuch. My generation is expected to live longer so I can retire when I'm 68 or somesuch. You see where this is going..

Generally speaking the PDF file is just registered for foxit in firefox so it gets automagically dumped to a temporary location and foxit (or acrobat) will handle the file. So I definitely do not save pdf files 1st and open them later.

I think foxit does all that for you as long as you un-tick "open PDF in browser" during installation.

Just don't use the firefox plugin. There's no particular _need_ to open the PDF in browser, is there?

Kick out the browser plugin and the pdf will open in the standalone program like FSM meant it.

Run all the time is a DIRECT RESULT of the general all around crappiness of the acrobat reader. Foxit kicks up in seconds without any background "quick start" applet. And so should acrobat.

The whole "quick start" background applet garbage appeared in acrobat 6, I think, when the startup time just got too damn bad.

Actually you can trim acrobat itself to start pretty quickly with the preload turned off. There's amazing amount of cruft in the plugins most people have no use for whatsoever. It's just not in the UI, but you can simply move plugin files to another folder.

I'd rather just use foxit. When they take enough demographic Adobe is probably forced to fix their crummy software, just like MS had to do with IE.

You forget whole geek bragging rights-aspect.

Another point worth keeping in mind is that the last 15% actually would cost you a whole lot of money. If you buy a CPU/GPU that is stock clocked 15% faster, you can easily end up paying 100% more.

Which is of course why CPU manufacturers have gone to considerable trouble to stop you from overclocking. Anyone remember overclocking Athlons with a pencil? Or the silly superglue-method tom's hardware guide came out with to overclock the CPU that made pencilling impossible?

Same with GPUs of course. And as everyone already pointed out, you can often get quite a bit more than "15%" more. My 3GHz Dual core is running at 4GHz, for example, just because I can. Low end parts tend to be more overclockable than high end.

They were (AMD) right, of course. It was true then and it's true now. Not that it meant diddly-squat in the markeplace realities but even intel dropped the megaherz is just a megaherz -nonsense after they came out with Pentium-M that kicked poor old P4 design where it hurts clock cycle to clock cycle.

Now about the megapixels. They're handy for cropping but for 10x15 photos most people take it doesn't make much difference if it's 3M or 6M or 12M. As a case in point, nice sublimation photo printers are 300dpi devices and still tend to look superior to most inkjets with far higher resolution because of the color reproduction.

The sad thing about megapixel war is that it actually hurts real camera performance => Cram more pixels to the same sensor area and you tend to hurt noise, dynamic range, low light performance.. As a case in point, you can have my Fuji F30 compact when you pry it out of my cold, dead fingers! It's "only" 6Mp device but it actually has superior image quality to the "improved" f50 that doubles pixel count to 12Mp on the same sensor. With F30 Fuji made "low" pixel count camera with larger-than-average sensor size on purpose and created a compact with superb low-light performance. With f50 you have double the pixels but low light performance and other image quality metrics went down, not up.

With f50 Fuji caved in to the market pressure (as they should as a business entity) but "more pixels equals better" just isn't true.

Not really a serious question, but since we're at it; I do not really see a problem for anyone supposing deity-of-your-preference created universe and life and so on: Exactly like it is, evolving, perfecting (to it's niche) .. After all the big book says something about free will and such. What are fundies to presume how omnipotent entity sees "free will"? Quite possibly for universe-as-a-reference-frame consciousness would see biosphere as an entity and so forth. Or, even more likely, galaxies would form a singular entity from such viewpoint..

Never mind, I'm not an expert, being atheist and all. However vatican of all places just dealt a serious blow to ID!

I wonder what IDers claim neanderthals are supposed to be. Beta versions?

There's always the option of packing your things and looking for a job somewhere with more humane working conditions.

• games

You think it's insane for game developers to require 4GB+ ram? Well it may be but they can and do. Lazy it may be, fact it is.

It's of course funny they can fairly easily cram the same game into Xbox360 that has 512MB because that's the platform spec and the programmers HAVE to make it work on that amount.

With PC gaming the programmers do not have hard upper limit except they're hurting the potential customer base if they require more than 4GB installed RAM because most people are not on 64bit windows.

That's not true. Chernobyl was no accident. The asshats were performing deliberate experiment on large live nuclear power station. In order to perform the experiment every safety system they had in place had to be turned off - The fail-safes would've kicked in and ruined their little experiment, see. As in preventing the plant from going boom. Even more damning, when they started to perform the experiment they had unexpected complications but decided to crank up the power and proceed anyways. You know the result.

So the fault was not with design or engineering but solely in management. Althought I'm sure engineers or rather some academic came up with the experiment to begin with.

You can read more about it here.