If your funding is so bad that you can't afford anything newer than a P3 and a 17" CRT, I have to wonder just how good the research is that you do. Or maybe that you just don't understand how technology has changed.

I encountered the latter in my undergrad days. I was a psych major for a time, and as is tradition they force students to participate in experiments to get free subjects. So one of them was on Internet addiction. This was in the early 2000s, while broadband was not common it was not rare either and the university was of course on a dedicated link. All the questions were around "How long are you connected to the Internet?" and "How often do you log in?" and such things.

I tried to explain to the researcher such questions weren't meaningful to me, my computer was on all the time and I could just use it like any other program. They didn't understand, and figured I didn't understand and kept repeating the question. I tried to explain and demonstrate with their office computer. That failed though, because the thing was so slow it took the better part of a minute to launch IE, which they thought was dialing in to the Internet. For them it wasn't a seamless experience, they only used the Internet when they needed/wanted to since it was so slow. I could not communicate to them that for an ever increasing number of us, it wasn't like that, it was just a part of using a computer.

I've encountered things like this a number of additional times with psychology/sociology/behavioral researchers. Their grasp of computer technology is so poor that their studies are extremely flawed because they don't understand the tools they are using.

That aside, maybe this works, who knows without a link to the paper, but it seems like a more effective use of computers and dieting are the widespread calorie tracker apps. When people actually track what they take in, they often can do a much better job at preventing it from getting excessive.

Intel's chips have been real good in terms of performance/watt these days. AMD has had real problems in that regard. Their high end chips are massive power sinks. Now in some uses, maybe that isn't important, but in a small system, it matters. You are going to have to jump though hoops to make sure you thermal system fits, is sufficient, and isn't loud anyhow, trying to put a ton more power in there isn't a winning idea.

Thus when you have the 4790k on the one hand, which is rated at 88 watts TDP, and the AMD AMD FX-9590 at 220 watts on the other hand, the choice is pretty clear. Even if performance were equal (it's not) the power savings is a clear win for a small unit.

At the moment a combination of older lithography technology and core design has AMD CPUs running pretty high power, so not the thing for SFF devices. Perhaps that will change with their next generation, we'll see.

You can argue for or against various licensing, insurance, bonding, etc requirements but what it comes down to is they need to be consistent. If a given type of work has that requirements, then everyone needs to be held to it, or it needs to be removed. You can't have it where some people have to jump through the hoops, but others don't.

A more extreme example would be pharmacists. To be a pharmacists requires a great deal of training and certification, in the US at least. That is how it is: You wanna dispense prescription medication you have to have the right degree, and experience and certification. Well, we can't very well have that but then also allow someone to be a "medicine sharing service" that just has random uncertified people who dispense medications. I suppose you could argue drug dealers are that and, what do you know, the government will put them in jail.

So if you think the licensing requirements for taxi services are silly, fair enough, let's work on getting rid of them. But Uber and the like shouldn't get a pass whereas traditional taxi services have to comply. Either is is a requirement or it isn't. It should have to do with the type of work you do, not the name of the company you work for/with.

That the government, to avoid that, can use force to reduce the numbers. Specifically forcing industry and citizens to produce less CO2. Things like checks to see how much you drive and prison if you go over, forced shutdown of industry, etc.

If you aren't ok with that, then you can't very well say the government should be arrested. After all, they themselves don't produce all the CO2, society at large does. They can't magic it away, meaning the only thing they can do is force citizens to comply.

Those of us who have to run our air-conditioners 24/7 seven+ months of the year disagree.

Maybe that's telling you something about the hospitality of the climate in which you have chosen to live.

(I've lived in Phoenix, so I know what you're talking about - but the level of waste of not only electricity, but water, involved in making that place liveable is staggering.)

Windows EOL dates are known way in advance. 10 years from the date of release. Sometimes they do extend it (they did with XP) but you can plan on a decade. That really is a good amount of time to plan on the lifecycle for your products. It is not too much to say "about once a decade we are going to make sure that our code is up to date and compatible with the current version of windows, and then transition to that". Were you to transition to 8.1, you'd have support until 2023.

While critical systems certainly aren't something to move to a new platform right away, you have plenty of time to do it in. This is just a case of feet dragging.

You don't have to have your stuff on their subscription services. It is up to the author (or publisher, whoever controls the copyright). You can have all, some or none of your stuff on their subscription services. However, many choose to have stuff on subscription because it helps people discover your stuff, and while you may not make a lot per view/listen, you make some and it can add up.

Pay per page view actually makes sense, as it helps reward authors that release stuff worth reading. If you do pay per book, then someone can release a book that look interesting, but has no substance. However if people have started reading, well they got their money, and they are done. With page views counting, then it is the stuff that is quality that people read to the end that gets rewarded.

It's the whole Shannon-Hartley theorem. The data rate you can get is limited by the frequency range and SNR you have. Well with stuff over the air the SNR is fixed by transmission power (which needs to be kept low to keep battery life up) and background noise. Frequency range is licensed since not all frequencies are created equal and everyone wants a piece. So the throughput you can get is limited. You can't do like with a wire and just add more wires, in a given area everyone has the same bandwidth to share.

So, you have to play nice. "Just increase the bandwidth" isn't a possibility. They can't magic around the laws of physics. What that means is if people play nice, and use their mobile bandwidth only as needed, it can be fast for everyone. However if people want to try and use it 24/7 and slam it, the speed will suck.

So one way or another, you have to keep people from using too much. I agree that total use isn't the best way, but it is one of the easiest to meter and understand, hence it gets used. Regardless of what method is used, something has to be. Otherwise you are going to have poor wireless speeds and nothing can be done to improve it.

My sister and her boyfriend live in London and they love the city, but don't really like living there. Both make reasonable money, but a massive chunk of it goes to pay for their housing which is not great. They are hoping to be able to move farther away which will be a pain commute wise, but allow them to live some place nicer that doesn't eat up most of their cash.

Master reel-to-reel tape was fucking expensive. So small time bands didn't keep the masters, or intermediate multi-track recordings. They instead reused tape that had already been used, and was then used again.

Even these days, plenty of time master recordings aren't kept. For professional productions they usually are but for others stuff often not. At work I do recordings some times and they are AVCHD recorded to internal flash in the camera. That gets erased and reused of course. When I dump the data, I keep it long enough to edit down the video and make sure the result is good, then purge it. It is too large to be worth keeping around. We could buy storage for it, but we don't.

Anyone with a bit of sense understands the difference. The reason the US can indict these FIFA officials is because they made the mistake of committing financial crimes that involved the US in some way. Either using US banks, or with US citizens/companies, or in the US. That makes it something the US can prosecute for, and obviously Interpol agrees.

Investigating the US space program. Ummm, well I mean you can "investigate" in terms of "Collect whatever evidence you can get your hands on and release a report," but that's all. No criminal case can be brought for anything since it is all in the US. They can't declare jurisdiction, the US would never agree (nor would international law) and the US has a big enough army that they can make that decision.

The limitation of the consumer nVidia cards is double precision floating point. He may not need that. There are plenty of problems that need only single precision math, the extra precision is wasted. In that case, you don't see much benefit going to the pro cards, certainly not enough to justify the price.

They created new rules very recently about reddit being a "safe space". This is something that is, of course, extremely vague. What the hell is a "safe space"?

So suddenly some long time subreddits are getting banned for violating that. They are all shitty splaces, but then other shitty places seem to get left alone. As such people are rightly saying "What the fuck?"

Basically the rule is an arbitrary one. They are saying "We can ban you if you say things we don't like." Now its their site, they can do that if they wish, of course, but that is why users are reacting so negatively. It isn't a clear rule that is being consistently applied, rather it is deliberately vague and being targeted in a scattershot fashion.

"Oh look at me, I'm so awesome, I don't need that high end technology! I'm just so great and productive that this old stuff is excellent!"

The reason I say that is because I've always seen it on Slashdot. Many people here seem to take pride in using old systems. Even back in the P2 days when a brand new system was still "slow" for a lot of things you'd have people humblebraging on how they were using a 486 and it was fine.

While I'll certainly agree that machines have WAY more life these days (a 5 year old machine is perfectly serviceable at work for most things) it has always been something I've observed on Slashdot. Rather than a bunch of people bragging on the high end hardware they have, as you tend to see on gaming forums, you have a bunch of people bragging on the low end hardware they have.

You have not identified any "fallacy".

Your posts are almost entirely fallacious reasoning. Red herrings, non-sequiturs, false dichotomies, straw men, circular reasoning, ad hominem. A veritable smorgasboard of broken reasoning. But that is to be expected from people that start at a conclusion and then try to reverse-engineer a trail of reasoning to reach it.

You have not identified any corporation, that quadrupled the price of its offering without improving quality (or due to spike in cost of raw materials).

You have not supported your premise that education today is identical to education in the 60s, nor that outcomes today are worse (or unimproved), let alone provided evidence - or even a rationalisation - that this change is a direct outcome of publicly-funded education.

The best performing education system in the world is generally considered to be Finland's, in which private schooling is all but nonexistent. Indeed, pretty much all the highest performing countries have education systems that are primarily publicly-funded. On top of that, widespread - near universal - high levels of education and literacy have only come about relatively recently with the wide availability of publicly funded education.

Consequently, the argument that publicly-funded education is inherently inefficient or low-performing is simply ridiculous on its face, and the argument that private suppliers can achieve the same outcome - given many millennia of failure to do so before the rise of public education - is sketchy, at best.

As I answered that poster and idiots like him. I want the government to [...]

You have failed to justify why these are the only two functions Government should perform. What you'd "like" is entirely up to you, but it carries no more weight than what I'd like - and at least what I'd like has some basis in reasoning, fact and evidence rather than ideology, paranoia and fear.

Statists expecting more from their government are, no doubt, welcome to Cuba and North Korea and the even much nicer Germany or Greece.

What's a "Statist" ? Someone who thinks Government has one more responsibility than you do ?