GIF was created by Compuserve in 1987 for their BBS-like service, so they had a captive user base. Their previous image standard was black and white -- 8-bit color was a new thing. JPEG was created by an international standards group to handle photographs, and I get the impression it came along about as soon as computers could handle it. I couldn't find any earlier (pre-1992) lossy color image formats. PNG was developed in 1995, within a year of Unisys announcing that it was going to enforce patents on the LZW compression used in GIFs, and even then it took many years and some bad publicity for Unisys before PNG really caught on.

GIF and JPEG were the first major color image formats of their type, and they were created about as early as possible. PNG was created in response to the limitations of GIF's patent status and 8-bit color, and was adopted much more slowly. I don't see a new image format catching on without a compelling reason, and historically, improvements in compression have not been enough. A reasonably high-quality, high-resolution image is just not that big.

By comparison, new video formats come along more frequently due to the large and increasing bandwidth requirements of high-quality streaming video, with early adoption coming from pirates, anime fansubbers, and other tech-savvy user bases.

What makes you think you would have known all about other people's mental illnesses when you were a teenager? Or who was medicated, or who attempted suicide? The first instinct most people (and their families) have is to *hide* their mental illness, and that's only if they make it past denial in the first place. SSRIs are usually taken once a day at home. When I went on Prozac in high school 15+ years ago I didn't tell anyone, and I don't think anyone knew. People noticed that I was in a better mood, and my grades went up, but it's not like there was a sign over my head that said "I don't want to kill myself anymore."

Well, what you said before was (emphasis mine):

You presented a scenario: Your wife discovers something about you that she didn't know. This new information leads her to suspect that you have been deceiving her, and have broken the trust in your relationship. (Not an uncommon thing, sadly.) Telling her the information in advance averts the surprise, and makes your explanation appear less likely to be ("another") lie. She might even enjoy reading other people's stories too.

I'm not talking about "people". I'm talking about one person, who (I hope) knows you pretty well.

You don't seem terribly concerned about your friend's wife, or the control he's imposing over her life by lying to her. I'm not saying you should stop being friends with the guy, but not caring at all seems quite extreme.

Personally, I find that my friends influence how I change as a person over a long period of time. Thus, the morality of my friends matters to me. I'm not interested in imposing my morality on others, I'm interested in improving my own.

I think you responded to the wrong comment.

This problem can be solved by the simple method of telling your wife that you have such an account.

If you don't care whether your friend violates the trust of the person he's supposed to be closest to, that's your decision. But most people would consider that an extremely low standard. Would you care if he lied to you?

(If his wife knows about it and is okay with it, that's different. But it doesn't sound like that's what you're talking about.)

On the other hand, a microcontroller needs software, which means a development and programming toolchain. Those tend to change fairly often -- come back to that project in a few years and you might have a whole new IDE to learn.

The neutrinos are traveling in a straight line through the Earth's crust. They barely interact with normal matter, so I don't think it's possible for there to be a "fault" that changes their path. For the same reason, neutrinos aren't terribly threatening to humans. Here's a Stack Exchange question with more information.

http://physics.stackexchange.c...

It's been almost eight years. I think a $30 video card could probably do a decent job of running Crysis at this point.

That was supposed to be the case with IPv4, and for a long time it was. If you want point-to-point communication, you need some kind of unique address on each end. It doesn't matter whether it's an IP address or a TCP port number. What makes it traceable is logging. Logging might be easier if every device actually has a pre-assigned static IP, but I suspect that for technical reasons ISPs will continue to prefer dynamic IP assignment. Tracing will probably be easier, but I doubt it will be "a police state and media cartel's wet dream".

Of course, inventing imaginary villains "SJWs" will ruin your mood regardless of technological infrastructure, so maybe you should work on that before worrying about IP addresses.

In addition to what others have said, lithium batteries batteries tend to burn or explode when traumatized. And motors are made out of metal.

Thank you for the thorough explanation. I wish I had mod points.

See above re: huge, complex, and nonlinear.

http://blogs.agu.org/geospace/...

Think of it in terms of energy. Raising the atmosphere's temperature by half a degree is the energy equivalent of detonating about two million nuclear warheads. The heat capacity of the ocean is a thousand times that of the atmosphere, but I'm not sure if the whole ocean has warmed along with the atmosphere. If it has, that would be two billion nuclear warheads. Earth's atmosphere is a huge, complex, nonlinear system. Adding more energy affects different parts of the world in different ways. (That's the nature of averages.) It can get a lot more than half a degree warmer in some places and a lot more than half a degree colder in others.

On top of that, you also get more chaotic weather. Heat is energy. Energy makes things happen.

Slashdot has been around since 1997. The interface is much older than the ability to easily edit comments. Use Preview for proofreading.

Do you have any evidence for that statement? Do you believe that quietly saying "Hey, we need to spend a ton of money and 10-15 years upgrading the internet, but take your time, there's no hurry" would actually prompt businesses to act?

We're changing the internet infrastructure of literally the entire world. Do you really think 10-15 years warning is too much? Think about all the things that have to happen. You have to create and formalize a standard for a new protocol, which takes years. You need to design, debug, and manufacture core routing hardware, which takes years. You have to upgrade all the consumer-level end equipment, which takes many years. None of this is trivial or fast. IPv4 took five years to go from final specification to total adoption, at a time when the total number of internet hosts could be measured in thousands. Today there are almost a billion hosts.