Comparing vector to raster is like apples and oranges, but that's an interesting observation... the choke point for graphics has shifted way up. it's because vectors are like blueprints (and the cpu cycles are like fantastic builders) whereas raster is a less-dimensional structure that can be easily displayed and copied, but not easily manipulated.

I don't think your black-and-white line test is a good one. The eye treats parallel lines specially.

For me, I can't distinguish lines from gray starting at about 30 inches from my 72-dpi laptop monitor.

http://djradon.com/bw_test/

By your test, I wouldn't fail to distinguish until 80" away. Or is my math off?

good for you.

now if only we had super-smooth AI agents to adopt your technique for us!

I disagree. The question is "number of USB cable types"

http://www.usbfirewire.com/uextendminib.html

proprietary connectors make it a non-usb cable in my book.

the different possibilities for ends should be limited to:

A = type A (std) male
a = type A (std)female
B = type B (D) male
b = type B (D) female
mA = mini A male
ma = mini A female
mB = mini B male
mb = mini B female
uA = micro A male
ua = micro A female
uB = micro B male
ub = micro B female

my collection includes:

A - A
A - a
A - B
A - mA
A - mB
A - uA

i am very suspicious of voters with more than 15 types.

You could have a democracy of largely informed and conscientious citizens.

The soulless zombie (wikipedia: lacks a soul but is otherwise indistinguishable from a human; this concept is used to inquire to what, if anything, the soul might amount) is useful in that it illustrates the beliefs of many people. it symbolizes romantic/religious/human intuitions about consciousness. i don't think it's especially relevant to the philosophy of consciousness, but it is a useful construct.

Slashdotters would love the challenge of a neurological zombie: Could you invent a beautiful machine that has a living human brain driving it? And if you could, would there be a way it could not have consciousness? I think this zombie supports functionalism, and so do I.

The role of the behavioral zombie (wp: behaviorally indistinguishable from a human and yet has no conscious experience) is again as a useful construct that's not that philosophically relevant. Most nerds don't have much trouble imagining a replicant of their own demising that would be very hard to distinguish from a human, but wouldn't have free will or self-awareness.

The white elephant in the philosopher's office is that the study of consciousness will eventually become more of an empirical discipline and rely less on the linguistic false-distinction or the unrealistic thought experiment.

Not to mention USB/PCI and AGP implementations are all hardware devices, presumably to be sold. Your comparison is horrible.

The day Firefox is "taken" by commercial software will be a sad day indeed. The Mozilla Foundation could probably get a reduced price on a license easily enough, but that's not the point.

scrabble is more fun when played with the universal dictionary.

I agree, authoring tool is a huge factor. A flash-the-application work-alike for multimedia, IMHO, is the open-source holy grail.

HELL NO! And furthermore, even if Flash penetration were 100% and they fixed the bug where the player captures my Firefox url and search bar shortcut keystrokes, I wouldn't develop for it. In my 14 years of web development, the only Flash I've ever created was a hidden music player on my otherwise-DHTML animated personal homepage. As soon as HTML5 embedded sound supports multiple simultaneous audio streams, you can bet I'm turfing that bullshit. Long live the open web.

If you mean an App Store SDK, not sure what that is, but I'd bet MS will host 3rd-party apps soon.

If you mean a development SDK, they've already released one:

http://blogs.msdn.com/xna/archive/2009/09/15/xna-game-studio-3-1-zune-extensions.aspx

Look for SDK support for NVidia graphics soon.

I agree with this guy, Zune game programming could be a great educational platform:

http://blogs.msdn.com/alfredth/archive/2009/09/16/zune-hd-as-a-programming-teaching-platform.aspx.

If you teach kids to write Zune games, you're teaching them how to write xbox and windows games too.

zing! take that, funny guy.