The point is knowing that your consciousness exists doesn't help you know that other's consciousness exists. I know my consciousness exists, but how do you know my consciousness exists?

Gray to gray speed is not the same thing as response time. Manufacturers don't generally provide response time numbers, they have to be tested by third parties. The best LCDs are generally about 50ms or so.

Consciousness is by definition not provable by just about anything.

Once automatons mimic you, how would you show consciousness over their patterns?

I am not the French Government

Of course not, Louis XIV is.

User interface.

Any delay is bad, and response time reflects that. If you're _only_ taking photos and looking at them, then response time does not matter. Anything else, it's important.

Wait.... which monitors got better? Cheap monitors are undeniably better now, but I kept an old CRT around for ages because it was much better with some things, most importantly for me response time.

Response time has got much worse with the advent of anything but CRT.

Now, I'll agree that monitors got cheaper, and higher resolution, but not necessarily better. 120hz is rare now, too.

The Canon S3 has much better lenses than any smartphone. That's the difference, and it's the only real difference. If we could make lenses smaller, and light behave in accordance with something that is not physics, we'd all have professional class cameras now.

The megapixel drive, whilst valuable, has ignored the fact that you can't get all that much from a tiny lens. The megapixel count on smartphones is largely irrelevant now, because of the lens restrictions.

The best pictures are almost always taken by amateurs, because the best situations are so rare, and at least 99% of photos are taken by amateurs now.

Personally, I don't think there are many photos better than the crasher squirrel.

The issue is that US Corporations are using foreign shells to shelter profits in jurisdictions with significantly lower tax rates. In essence, they're claiming that their subsidiaries based in Ireland (for example) are immensely profitable -- at a rate of only 12.5% -- while their North American operations claim hundreds of millions in R&D and management expenses to reduce tax paid to Uncle Sam.

Not all malware is a virus, just about every virus is malware. Viruses aren't all that useful to people who are trying to steal your bank details, because they're indiscriminate.

Slashdot does not allow edits for a reason. Editing troll posts 24 hours afterwards makes for very disjointed discussion, and makes other people look stupid.

I read all the Wheel of Time books until about 7 or 8, after which I lost interest. However, I've currently nearly finished listening to the total series on audiobook (half way through a memory of light). It's 19 days, 5 hrs, 25min long, so if anyone spoils the end for me now, I may well be a little pissed off.

No, I won't be reading any replies to this comment.

I suspect you could also use an unregulated trebuchet to launch something over a fence, or perhaps an unauthorized weather balloon with a payload to drop something on your neighbor's lawn from altitude. Or a slingshot (although those might be illegal within city limits). The notion of a serious "security gap" is farcical because any reasonably intelligent person could come up with a number of clever ways to outwit fences and exclusion zones.

Never heard of autocon. I'd bet it used some of that 640k though.

Salt, and water. That's about it.