There's a big difference between making irrational choices and presenting a future world where the systems simply wouldn't work as described. From a writing standpoint, you want your readers immersed in the story, not distracted by inconsistencies that suggest the world as described was not given much thought.

Yup, this raise one of my big complaints about some SciFi stories: lack of economic plausibility.

Science Fiction is great for looking at how we might deal with various potential technologies. Readers are perfectly happy to suspend disbelief and accept whatever technology is proposed. What readers aren't willing to do is suspend disbelief and accept people behaving implausibly.

To write good science fiction, you need to accurately portray people. You can make up the technology, but you have to get humanity right. And that means you have to get the economics right.

This is exactly the problem I had with reading the Hunger Games. Everything worked, except why would a society with hover cars and other advanced technology have need of the services of the districts? Surely they didn't need coal, and yet they had a whole district dedicated to mining it. The lack of economic sense pulled me out of the book. Instead of thinking about the characters, I was thinking about why the society that was described didn't make any sense.

Thanks, that's good to know. So many people talk about gaming performance, and at one point the open source drivers were getting good at some 3D without the video acceleration piece.

As to the other question, I'm probably one of the few people with a HTPC who has a tube HDTV that is 1080i. It's really a great TV (36"), and I don't have to worry about the little one knocking it over. Or maybe the HTPC crowd has lots of early adopters, but the rest have moved on to bigger and thinner.

The OpenGL stuff is nice for gamers, but what about for the HTPC? How well do the drivers do on video playback acceleration? Can they do MPEG-2 and H264 in HD resolutions with minimal CPU?

I don't suppose they can play a 1080i video and get the fields consistently correct for letting the TV handle the deinterlacing (or keep it interlaced if the TV is an old tube HDTV)?

Could tachyons be where the dark matter mass comes from?

No, they can't legally sell them in the USA anymore without some serious engineering changes. They got a waiver on some of the safety regulations that has expired. They also had a limited contract with Lotus for the bodies.

So to do a new run of roadsters, they would have to do a lot of engineering and essentially make a new car. Right now, they don't have the capacity in engineering or production to make more models; they're struggling to get the Model X out, and they've got their eyes on the III.

I wouldn't be surprised if they make a new Roadster eventually, but I would put it at five years out at the earliest.

Besides, given the performance of the P85D, I'm not sure how much more there would be besides a different body shape.

The one update they really should do along with the battery upgrade is add Supercharger support.

Thanks for finding that source! I was looking at the list of floppy disk formats on Wikipedia to respond, and it didn't have that.

80 cylinder, 96 TPI

This was the second type of 5.25" drive made, and the least popular (and known) of the three types of drives. These double the capacity of the original drive by doubling the number of cylinders (tracks) from 40 to 80. They use the same media as the the 40 cylinder 48 TPI drives, but it is certified (tested) on all 80 tracks, as opposed to the standard disks which were only certified at 40 tracks.

These drives were never common on PCs, although DEC used a single sided version called the RX-50, in the DECMate word-processor, the DEC Rainbow and several other DEC computers, including the PDP-11 and the VAX.

Other than the DEC RX-50, these drives were almost always double sided, and recorded in double density MFM. They had a capacity of around 720K. Like the 40 track drives, they used 300oe media, and the drive rotates at 300 RPM

So apart from one very rare example, if you're talking 5.25" disk floppies, 360K meant double-sided. I expect the vast majority of people cutting out the notches to flip over their disks were using Apple II, Atari, or Commodore computers. In that realm, 90K was SS/SD and 180K was SS/DD. Most users didn't have double-sided drives until the IBM PC started using 360K DS/DD disks.

Sorry, punching the tab out on the other side so that you could flip the disk over only worked on single-sided drives.

Single-sided, single-density: 90K
Single-sided, double-density: 180K
Double-sided, double-density: 360K

So if you were already at 360K, you were already double-sided.

I am just about to build a FreeNAS or NAS4Free box. I was planning on running three 4TB drives to give me 8TB usable, but I'm probably better off with a pair of these. I'm mostly using the storage for TV recording, so the slower speed is fine. If the slower speed also means lower power, then it's a big plus.

Mass. Gen Laws ch.76, Â 15:
"In the absence of an emergency or epidemic of disease declared by the department of public health, no child whose parent or guardian states in writing that vaccination or immunization conflicts with his sincere religious beliefs shall be required to present said physicianâ(TM)s certificate in order to be admitted to school."

So there's broad religious exemptions such that anyone willing to claim them can skip the process, but if there is a serious outbreak, then suddenly the exemption goes away. That's not a bad compromise.

I haven't heard of the state ever declaring such an emergency, but I hope they are ready to do so before an outbreak becomes a full epidemic.

I'm planning on setting up one of these in a month, and I'm considering FreeNAS and NAS4Free. I'm very interested in comments from anyone with experience with both.

At the top of the article, it shows an Atari 2600 in front of a TV. Displayed on the TV is Pac Man. But it isn't the 2600 version. It looks like the 800 version, or possibly the 5600 version (which was only slightly different).

Mixing up the graphics like that is just wrong.

Especially when the 2600 version of Pac Man was notorious for being so horribly bad. If only it had looked like that.

Doesn't prohibiting network connections to the X server rather defeat one of the major features of X?

Granted, I think I usually am tunneling my X connections through ssh, so perhaps this doesn't apply as widely as it did a few years ago.

Look how similar our culture is to that of the Roman Empire. Yes, technology has changed every aspect of how things are done, but the culture itself isn't much different. The Roman historian Suetonius was writing thousands of years ago about how they were upset about the decay of family values.