I'm sure a lot of people will take the android thing as a slight being associated with Mormon, so I'm not sure why he avoided the analogy that the whole thing was begging: Apple as Islam. Someone else said Microsoft as Scientology which was a good one as well.

Even top of the line video cards don't inflate a system that much. People who build $600 PCs for gaming tend to spend about a third of the price on the video card. Everything else is pretty cheap.

Assuming 3kg/package, and average truck net weight of 20,000kg (I work in shipping), that'd be 6,700 quadcopters per truck.

Its misses the point entirely though. The use of trucks is fuel economy, ease of transportation, and economies of scale. Aerial delivery will always be a niche product because its so inefficient.

Here's what I mean: http://www.nrdc.org/international/cleanbydesign/images/cbdtranspo_fig1.png

That's like hooking a horse up to a car without an engine and saying its intended for transportation. Container ships around 80% of that size need an order of magnitude more horsepower to function.

Prohibition was caused because China was imploding in on itself in a drug frenzy. Over 10% of the population was addicted to opioids, and the country was falling into ruin.

I like these sites too, and I'd like to give a special shout-out to Toms and Anandtech for their investigative approach. Anandtech was first to provide the reason the signal attenuation issue for the "you're holding it wrong" iPhone and I beleive Toms was the first to break the 'microstutter' issue on AMDs previous generation of graphics cards (correct me if I'm wrong on either of these). I think one of these sites was the first to address monitor input lag as well, and Anandtech addressing the recent benchmark cheaters.

They both have their black marks though. Anandtech used to be very hardware focused for the open builder, but now spend a lot more focus on mobile and especially Apple, so you can't use them as a go-to source for a total comparison of top performing products since they don't review enough competitors. Toms had some kind of bias scandal I think, but I still find them to be a good source of gaming information and their charts and 'of the month' are great tools to get the best bang for your buck when shopping for a new system.

Good post Woodhams, I'll use an analogy I formed when discussing Psychology with my girlfriend whose been in the field a while: Psychology today is like studying Chemistry in the bronze age. Back then, they didn't have the means to understand the why of this chemical working with this chemical, they just knew it worked and did Chemistry via trial and error and guessing. Today, psychology is classifying things based on relations and forming best practices, but we don't understand why things are the way they are because of our limited understanding of the brain.

Maybe things will change in 100 years, maybe not. I think the field is worth its weight in gold though, there's a lot of good that can be/is being done and a lot of progress still to be made.

A good area to put research into, in my opinion. Valve may have won the new controller research, but we'll have to wait and see.

The single most important factor in a console is the control scheme. If the control scheme sucks, it feels like PC console ports do.

Since 2001, the bands used by cell phones have changed and the power requirements of the antennae have changed as well. Due to more concurrent users, you need more cell towers to re-use the frequencies, with the added benefit of a shorter transmission distance and less power required on the cell phone itself to do that transmission. In 2001, cell phones still had the analog bands that stretched city-wide.

You are a conspiracy nut.

Set up some system to provide the call data, provide the relatively low cost infastructure to do it, and you're rolling in $10m/year?

Companies don't make money with billion dollar checks, its incremental. If their infastructure and support for this is $2m/year and you have to staff 8 people for it, that's still a massive profit margin.

In theory, yes. But in practice, they tend to strangle the industry once they grow to an industry-wide monopoly. It becomes about bravado and 'getting more' because that's how the union leaders stay in power, so it creates a field of political waste. As an industry, it no longer becomes a race to progress and competing with your rivals, but who can slash costs enough to stay afloat when crushed with huge union costs. Yes, all the companies in the industry experience these, but it actually serves to cripple and centralize the industry, the exact opposite of what a union should theoretically do.

Problem with this logic is that power consumption is a factor. While the chips are underclocked, they are also undervolted by a proportional amount. Undervolting with underclocking was a rare pasttime by overclockers, some done as hobby and others done in a quest for performance/watt crown. The chips binned for the highest clocks and the chips that overclock the best run at higher clocks on the same voltage, or more efficient. The same chips can be undervolted and perform the highest clock at their lower respective voltage. Since the low power chips are sold on battery life, you can't just take an inefficient processor and undervolt it and call it a day.

Its a pervasive problem in Canada, primarily with specialists, even in populated areas. My girlfriend had to wait 6 months for a gastroscopy, is 3 months into a wait for a PH test, and about 4 months out from surgery for badly progressed Barret's syndrome.

Canadian healthcare works fine for basic checkups and doctor visits, but fails miserably when it comes to spcialists. Finland, highly lauded as one of the best socialized healthcare systems as well, suffers the same problem: my Aunt died during the waiting period from Breast Cancer because of the nonsense, and had previously lost the 'doctor lottery' which is a way to describe how you get screwed if the doctor you're assigned to there is terrible. This is what the 'death panel' talk is really about, insane waiting lists that kill needing patients because they didn't get priority.

The problem with US healthcare costs is mostly related to emergency care and major procedures, which tends to have problems in every socialized medicine implementation in the world as well. Yeah, I think costs could come down as well as basic preventive medicine be more practiced by standardizing basic visits and screenings, which hopefully the ACA will help with. However, I'm against making the other half of the pie public. There's a reason there's tons of doctors offices on the US side of the Canadian border...they scoot over the border to get immediate care needs and specialist services.

At the same time, this is the downfall.

If you attempt to make a scientifically accurate depiction, you're dabbling in pseudorealism, not science fiction. When you go that far, and work off of historical realistic depictions of real world things like the space shuttle, hubble, and the space station, you better get the facts right.

What makes this type of movie enjoyable is the possibility of the improbable, not the impossibility of sci fi.

And in some cases, arrested because someone is illegally abusing the legal system. For example, a revenge lawsuit after a breakup for stalking, fabricated by the mother and daughter. It didn't happen to me, but I've seen it happen. The mother has a history of abusing the legal system and is doing it for her daughter. Regardless of it getting dismissed as nonsense, the mug shot is plastered everywhere and the first google of the guy it happened to is about an arrest.