It could be argued that in the days of "wooden ships and men" the men were less expendable than they are now.

We're nearing a world population of 7 billion. If you think a few thousand of those aren't "expendable" as long as they enter into the deal knowing all the risks, then you need to do some math.

They're far more "expendable" than they were back when the world population was only a few tens of millions.

We're becoming progressively more worthless.

And the "Wooden ships" part being more expensive is because we've placed opportunity costs on the materials needed to build ships. We can build one rocket out of aluminum, or we can build another million iPhones. Sadly these days, we're choosing the iPhone.

With a hammer. $6 and I got vent some job frustration at the same time.

I can buy a lot of hammers for 2000 euro.

Or one hammer, and some other cool tech toys.

DVDs cost between $1 and $15.

Most Blu-Rays cost around $24 to $30.

The picture quality isn't worth the doubling in price. Especially when for $9 a month, I can stream Netflix to my TV in better than DVD resolution.

I was hoping the price of BluRay would drop as fast as the price on DVDs has, but it hasn't happened.

Mine too.

Both ATT and Verizon will sell you a cellular access point that plugs into your regular internet connected network.

We are analog machines. It varies.

Some people are color blind. Some people see 4 colors (tetrachromat).

Professional baseball players can see the stitches on a ball when it's coming at them, and see which way they're turning. Odds are you probably cant. Some people see 15 fps as persistent vision, almost everyone else needs 24 fps.

They test pilots by showing a silhouette of a plane on a screen for 1/220th of a second. The ones that can see it, and identify the plane become pilots. The ones that can't see it and/or can't identify it don't. Many people can't.

Read up on it. There's been a LOT of testing on it. Especially around the time of the creation of films and automobiles.

Taillights are red because it doesn't destroy our night vision once we've adapted to the dark. Blue and green light does. Lots of research into how much color we can see, and which ones work well next to each other and don't. It's fund stuff to read up on.

Because, unlike the eye, your Samsung isn't a constant display device.

Your eye captures a stream of video information with no frames. It's just a persistent sine wave. There's no "blanking interval" like there is in TVs (I know LCDs don't have a blanking interva, but there's still an equivalent where a pixel isn't being addressed and is sitting idle, slowly dimming), they constantly send a sine wave. Similar to how the difference between an original analog music waveform (our eyes) and the cd sampling rate (digital displays) work. Each rod and cone has it's own nerve signaling path to send down the optic nerve. (it's about 1.2 million nerve fibers.)

Sadly, your TVs pixels are not persistently individually addressed. They have a refresh rate as the system walks through each pixel in the grid. The key is to do the pixel update before it fades so much that we notice it. On larger LCDs, the panels are broken up into multiple panels, so it does multiple panels at once. Our eyes on the other hand, each cone/rod is constantly sending information. Somehow our brain stitches it into our perception of the world around us.

You will also note that the Samsung site says this:

You're not really seeing 120 Hz. And you have processing circuitry in there to deal with that mucking with it all. If the LCD runs at 60 Hz, and you feed it a 100 Hz signal, that's not an even multiplier of 60, so the panel circuitry has to do some sort of pulldown to sync it with the display. Pull-down circuitry frequently leads to visible judder in images, that's why DVDs mastered at 24 fps don't look right if your TV doesn't have good 3:2 pulldown software. 120Hz is very easily mapped to a 60Hz panel (it just drops every other frame). Since it's a consistent drop-frame effect, your eye smooths it out easily. If it dropped every other frame for 10 frames, then dropped two frames for the next two frames, then back to 1 in 10, etc, your eye would see that. It may even be what's happening.

Here's the best reference I can find to date:

http://books.google.com/books?id=-e9PqP8_CA0C&pg=PA213&lpg=PA213&dq=data+rate+of+optic+nerve&source=bl&ots=8SxM6u24BQ&sig=G_KBapsdppnZSRFAKxj8JKylzwY&hl=en&ei=7R2lTeWeNOa_0QGRhtDwCA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=5&ved=0CCsQ6AEwBA#v=onepage&q=data%20rate%20of%20optic%20nerve&f=false

Sorry it's google books. I remember reading the statistic somewhere during the refresh rate wars on monitors during the early 2000's. I had a 17" Monitor, and anything less than 75 Hz gave me massive headaches. So I started doing research and found out the optic nerve can only handle about 100 Hz. It varies by person a little up and down. We are analog machines after all.

It may be higher, the linked book mentions a consistent rate of 200 pulses per second. Which might give rise to a 200 fps measurement, depending on if a "pulse" is both the top and bottom half of the sine wave. The book also states that it can max out at 1000 pulses per second, but it can't maintain it before nerve degradation happens.

It varies from person to person. There are people who see 15 fps as continuous. There are those who have to cross the 24 fps threshold. 500 fps may be perceivable with a burst of adrenaline. The human visual cortex is still largely a mystery to scientists.

24 fps isn't arbitrary. It's the result of a lot of research.

It's the minimum number of frames that trick 99.9% of people into seeing a constant image on screen.

Slower rates result in flicker.

Higher rates, on 1920's technology, were progressively prohibitively expensive.

48 Fps is great. It's roughly half the maximum frame rate of we can see (the optic nerve refreshes at approximately 100Hz).

We'll get too 100fps soon. Anything over that isn't worth it.

This doesn't apply to LCD TVs and what not.

Yes. That's how I got through high school.

Having worked for the government, yes, I do. If it's a one off project. Or only a handful.

There's no "open market" for the government to allow to absorb research and development costs or to achieve economies of scale.

If you need a special inertialess (non-rebounding, not physics-violating) sparkless hammer that can be used in an explosive gas-filled environment, and you need, say, 3. The government will commission and buy 10. The initial development and testing costs all get rolled into the cost of those 10 hammers, no matter how many man hours and resources it takes.

And, having watched the USMC test a piece of equipment in a "shaker box" designed to imitate driving a HumVee over rough terrain, hearing the salesperson from the company say, "Oh shit, there's no way this is going to....." and watching the piece of equipment explode 6 seconds into the test, there's a lot of engineering involved in meeting weird military requirements.

Is there money hidden and wasted in there? Yes, probably.

Does that hammer really cost $20,000 to develop? Yes, probably.

Do any of these offer baseline measurements as a control?

I look at some of those maps and think, "Man, 25's a big number. I mean, that's a lot of whatever. I should probably think about what to with my family/pets/tape backups." (Hardcore slashdotters can reverse that order.)

But, what if before the big scary nuclear steam cloud, the number was 24 already? Is an increase in 1 really worth worrying about?

What if it was 30?

What if it was 5?

How do I know?

It seems that most of this info might not be that helpful without pre-nuclear-plant-explosion numbers.

Maybe it's just me?

This is the first time I've ever asked for Slashdot to dupe a story.

But, post this again, in 60 days, when the movie is out so I can get it.

It also highlights the brain's ability to adapt to ludicrously high speeds, which has come in handy as we've gone further up the technological progress curve.

The most important thing you need is every copy of the keys to that space. Don't even let the janitor have one.

If people have keys to it, eventually someone will open the door when they're doing a building inspection, and think, "Man, this is a great place for a closet. Clear all this random junk (read: your in progress project) out of here, and we'll be able to claim X amount of square feet back on the management floor, where it clearly goes to better use."

Seriously. Keys. Everything else is nice, but you need to control the space that was built reluctantly.