It seems it might be worthwhile to watch this today, I can't just read this conversation and series of posts without having an emotional reaction.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F8SdkAgsoM4

I'm pretty sure the plan isn't to house it on one IC.

Throwing everything at Earth would require organization and agreement from people of all kinds of highly conflicting ideologies. Building something somewhere else can be spearheaded and handled by a single group, or consortium of a few organizations (countries, companies, senators, etc...) who want to reap the benefits, but also keep the end goal and needs clear and concise.

Where do you shop? For $1500 I can buy a pretty fantastic computer with Windows on it.

So what you're saying is if the light had been yellow longer you would've been fine. What exactly are you arguing about?

Nielsen does not only meter the people who watch a program when it airs. They haven't done this in over a decade. DVR and Instant view options do not negatively impact Nielsen's tracking. If you live in the middle of nowhere Nielsen still rates anyone who saw the program or saw it within one day of it airing. If you live in a metropolis there a significantly more dynamic cuts of data available including tracking people who see a program within 7 days of it being aired.

More importantly, media buyers don't buy internet ads the same way they buy TV, so to say that TV ratings are less effective is completely untrue. You buy your TV ads separately, and you use the TV ratings metrics from Nielsen to know how effective the television portion of the buy is. You get metrics for other media types from other places.

Yes a company that rates only when a show aired live such as Nielsen did decades ago, would be useless now...but Nielsen is a live and growing company (they just bought Arbitron), they have adapted and are doing fine, all that's happened is that the market for TV spots has gotten smaller because of these other places for buying ads.

Nielsen TV ratings don't track the popularity of a program, they track how many people were watching within a given quarter hour on tv. Which is a very useful metric if you want to buy tv ads.

Nielsen accounts for non-real time watching in their ratings. Including DVR and instant streaming..

Nielsen accounts for DVR/instant streaming in metered markets. The cuts of data are for people who saw it within as much as seven days of when the spot ran, and ad-agencies both have the ability in some cases to disable the ad skipping fast forward, also they develop ads specifically so that they can verify you'll have seen a certain amount of information when fast forwarding..

A significant part of this is color temperature and spectrum. A bulb that only emits mainly green or yellowish light is going to appear dimmer than an incandescent that's providing a much wider spectrum of color.

Since when was a 54% approval rating in an industry considered "good"?

For me it's Flow My Tears the Policeman Said.....that's about as depressing as a story gets on every level possible.

Of course A Scanner Darkly is no book of smiles and happy prancing unicorns either

He was replying to a post that was entirely anecdotal...I fail to see why he has to adhere to one standard when the OP does not.

Huge FPS numbers actually are very useful for a variety of reasons. FPS is highly variable during gameplay, the higher the general FPS, the better your FPS will be when the game gets swamped with moving particles...which means it might not slow to a crawl at the most intense and exciting parts of the game...something that is particularly important in a multiplayer game like L4D.

Not to mention of course the fact that we are able to see a relatively accurate measurement of efficiency between two platforms, which of course is the article's point.

of course I'm not addressing where the magical five minutes is coming from either, just making a point about 'typical' developers

If you are a typical software developer the above doesn't happen because why would you develop on an OSX machine when you're not developing for the OSX platform?