Ask again in 200 years. Then we'll know if understanding asteroids proved useful. It takes a long time for basic research and pushing the boundaries of human understanding to pay off, but some of it eventually does. You know, like the electron, or semiconducting, or liquid crystals, or imaginary numbers. All of that stuff was ivory tower academic fluff at one point. The whole value of "out there" research is that it is in areas that we don't fully understand yet, and therefore have no idea how useful they might eventually become.

You are assuming a more rational person than most of them probably are. Try "I'm obviously a better driver than any computer or most other people, but if they reduce my premiums, I'm willing to take on the extra risk in exchange for the extra money in my pocket and convenience."

Don't forget, you can buffer a YouTube video. Can't really get a 30 second buffer of an RDP session. The requirements are very different.

Well, it probably does real time encodes of 24 FPS content, but perhaps would struggle a bit more with 60 FPS+ Desktop content. Likewise, if the content is photographic, the compression artifacts tend to be less noticeable. Have some simple shapes and bright colors with crisp edges like a GUI in the mix, and you tend to need much higher quality than with photographic content. Even doing the encode in real time at adequate quality, you are probably encoding to a long GOP codec which has quite a lot of inherent latency. If the GOP size adds 1 second of latency, it doesn't matter how much CPU and bandwidth you throw at the problem, it would still be very bad for real time interactive uses.

* (Used to be an Engineer responsible for dealing with remote sites and technology for real time remote color grading sessions transmitted over the internet and over private WAN links using H.264 and JP2K based codecs mostly for TV commercials.)

Very few currencies are, except to other currencies. I mean, I suppose you could say the value of the US Dollar is attached in some vague way to the military power of the US, and thus their ability to force people to accept the currency, but that's hardly a useful conversion for daily use.

To the contrary, you can never be referred to as a professional. Having to work a job is for the little non Lord people.

And even if the driving robots don't work better than the sugary robots, just look for a robotic two-for-one deal and you are almost guaranteed to make it to your destination in one piece.

Question 1- a title is supposed to inform you on what the story is about. That makes option (a) a bad choice. The sun is in the story, but is not a central actor. Option (d) is also a bad choice, it would make a relatively unimportant part the theme.

I'm sorry, but that's fucking ridiculous The suggestion that a title is "supposed" to inform you in any particular way is absurd. Some titles are chosen because they fit in with a particular pattern of other works in the series. (Final Fantasy : Advent Children. Tell me anything about the story based on that title!) Some titles are picked purely for marketing reasons. (The Day The Earth Stopped. Named to ride the coat tails of The Day The Earth Stood Still.) Some titles are picked purely because they sound cool, or because of a pun of a character's name that is funny. Some titles are awkward translations (Try deciphering some Anime titles and tell me how informative they are.)

What the title of a story should be is absolutely subjective. "Which of these possible titles best explains what the story is about?" might be a reasonable question. But, absent a specified metric, there is absolutely no way to qualify a sample's success with regard to that metric.

Well then why not subdivide all time zones in 1/4 so people at the end of a current timezone can get an extra 45 minutes? Why is 1 hr granularity "correct" but two hour granularity "incorrect" despite all the simplification in offers? The hour listed on the clock is arbitrary. Don't want to get up in dark? Fine, schedule your work day however you want. I've worked real jobs where I went into the office at 1:00 pm or 10:00 pm.

Why would it matter in any sense if sunset happens at 3:11? Would it make you happier if we called it something else? You understand that the correlation between when we do things and what number is on a clock is completely arbitrary, right? We could go from 3:10 to HERBERT O'Clock and then to 3:12 every day and skip over the whole issue of sunset at 3:11. It would happen at HERBERT instead.

But there is an exception : adding manpower to a late software project being managed and created by incompetants who will never be able to finish it on their own can indeed be helpful. I mean, doing web front end stuff isn't exactly my specialty so if you gave me a big web project it would eventually be quite late, and adding web developers to it would get it done quicker than leaving me alone with it.

Defmacro defines that, but, who defines defmacro?

Templates.

A - anything that you can't do by tesselating to triangles could be done with OpenCL or CUDA. You could, for example, assign OpenCL kernels where each instance rasterizes one stroke and composite the results or something similar, and exploit the paralellism of the GPU. But, it would be inconvenient to write. Especially since most PDF viewers don't even bother with effective parallelism in their software rasterizers.

B - you can do anything by tesselating to triangles.

Yeah, exactly like how Tivo buyers were all open source advocates, and Apple TV buyers are primarily interested in the fact that the kernel has posix API's. Though, there may be a small group of SteamBox buyers who buy it mainly because of playing games, and don't really care about what OS it runs.

How is the project named? Is it something reminiscent of the function (like PaintShop Pro, Photoshop, Internet Explorer) or something entirely random, forcing more cognitive load on an uninformed user (Gimp, Firefox, Juice)? Does it have a newish, edgy name to give it that extra sizzle (pantyshot, upskirt [zdnet.com]).

Thankfully, nobody ever game a dumb name to a piece of technology unless it was open. And nobody ever had to download the MSVCRT redistributable libraries, or install a Java runtime separately for a piece of closed source software, because they never depend on 3rd party packages.

Nobody would argue that there isn't a heaping spoonful of shittiness available to you in the open source world. You just have to accept that there are a million closed source apps out there that taste just as nice, despite the fact that they never released the source code. It's not really an issue of closed vs. open. It's an issue of limited resources and dumb ideas. I'm posting this from Windows 8 at the moment. As much as I can find to complain about KDE (and egad, so much...) I can find just as much here in proprietary land.

I'll grant documentation tends to be worse in open source as a general rule. But, if you ever wound up depending on some obscure closed source widget with a lone developer who doesn't fully share a spoken language with you, you will see documentation just as useless. Though, getting a thriving community of good technical writers interested in the open source movement would be a good things.