Video quality may not matter much if you're interested, but it can definitely be distracting. Just the other day I was watching a streaming video clip from a local cable news station that was very pixelated... it looked like it was encoded at about 160x120 resolution and I was watching it full screen. Even though I was really interested in the particular story, the entire time I was watching the jagged edges of everything and wondering why they didn't encoded it at a higher quality or at least apply some sort of smoothing algorithm to it.

Speaking of spurious up-mods, I noticed further on down in the comments for this story there's a sub-thread with tons of highly rated comments that's entirely devoted to a debate about Civil rights legislation and Democrats vs Republicans. Every one of those is just screaming for Off-Topic moderation, but in practice it doesn't happen!

The thing is, the whole policy of promotion instead demotion fails in practice because of situations like that. Do I just moderate the first post in a thread as off topic, or all of them? Frequently the first post is on-topic but then responses drift off into a political or ideological rant having nothing to do with the title of the story. So, like below, we end up with a series of highly rated comments having absolutely nothing to do with the story!

That is an excellent idea! In fact the whole Meta-moderation on Slashdot needs to be rethought. It's far too hard to effectively meta-moderate without seeing the context of a comment. One big advantage of Digg is that I'm right there in the thread, and I can see how other people have moderated and can immediately help try to control abuses. Despite some of the group-think tendencies, I don't think people give Digg enough credit on moderation. I've found them overall to be surprisingly effective at promoting reasonable comments, and demoting the jerks.

Interesting! So that brings up the question: What is the threshold number of notes before a progression becomes a copy? Was that brought up in the case?

Out of curiosity I googled it, and came up with this nice summary, however it's still not entirely clear what constitutes a copy.

From watching TV, you would think that time travel is almost always guaranteed take you to one of the iconic eras of the 20th century

Of course giving special favors to large corporations happens all the time and distorts the market. But to assume it's solely because they're greasing some politicians hand, and that all we would have to do to raise extra money is end that practice is a gross oversimplification of the problem. Every state has to worry about jobs and unemployment. When a company promising 5,000 jobs is choosing between your city/state/country and somewhere else for it's new HQ, you can bet they're going to give the company every allowance to ensure they choose them, and will reap the benefits from keeping those jobs close to home.

I think you've hit on the right features Facebook provides, but the key word here in all of them is "EASY". That is the biggest hurdle for open source... providing an easy end user experience. That, and attracting developers.

Funny you bring that up because I actually ran into the same issue in my college days. Some of my upper level math and science tests were such that 40-50% was the cutoff for F's and very smart people still regularly failed tests. I felt lucky when I was able to swing a C in some of those classes. Contrast that with courses outside those majors in which just showing up practically guaranteed a B or better. The thing that stinks is that this can hurt you when out looking for your first job if an employer has a GPA requirement.

True, there is magazine style benchmarking, but you still have to cross reference that with for the most part arbitrary processor numbering schemes, where a higher number doesn't necessarily mean it's faster. Which makes it really difficult to compare if you want to know what that extra % of performance is going to cost you.

I honestly think this nonsense is hurting sales... I can only speak from my experience but personally I've passed up on an impulse buy for a motherboard/processor combo to do research only to end up reconsidering whether I even really needed it. Which was a good thing for me I suppose, but horrible for their sales if others are doing the same thing.

But do you really need to store a day's worth? It sounds like the surge in the article only lasted about an hour so you really just need something to regulate the flow for a short time. An hour gives quite a bit of time to ramp down production elsewhere on the grid. I guess the question then is it cheaper to build more out of inter-regional line capacity and distribute it better, or to have a battery backup for the turbines.

That would have to be a pretty large bank of batteries to store the power from a 1-2MW wind turbine. I'd guess maybe around a thousand(?) off the shelf deep cycle batteries for an hour worth of capacity. Not sure what's available in the commercial realm. A $200k system at least. My numbers are probably way off, but really that doesn't sound too bad when we're talking a million dollar wind turbine.

As with many things in life! Especially when dealing with a mega-corp

You can, but just as the processor capabilities of processors have become fuzzy, so have what is generally good enough to do a given task. For example:
Video processing, animation/rendering... quad core unless you have tons of time
Gaming... Fast dual core
Video, multimedia, light gaming... slow dual core
web browsing, email, older apps/games... single core

If only the iPhone could replace a computer... But there are just too many limitations and restrictions on what it can do compared to even a netbook. Someday I think mobile devices will be to that point but not today

How true... I'm actually in the same boat where I've been thinking about upgrading for the last 2 or 3 years but haven't actually pulled the trigger yet. Sure I can look at charts and reviews and get a general idea of what's got the best performance for some tasks, and then try to cross-reference with the deals at different retailers but who has time for that? In some ways I miss the days 10 years ago when you went with AMD or Intel and got the fastest MHz you could afford (I certainly don't miss the prices though!)

Some combination that measures both how many operations per second, and how much power it's going to take to do said operations (i.e. Watts/computing unit). I don't know if even FLOPS is sufficient anymore to describe current computing tasks. Heck, I'd be happy with any sort of standardization.