Using a beefier GPU isn't necessarily the wrong choice, assuming you can sink enough heat. From my perspective, the critical questions are how it compares in terms of power per watt and minimum idle power.

For example, consider two GPUs. The faster chip uses 80% more power at full throttle, but gives you twice the computing power. So if you need to do 10 units of work, the slower ship will take 10 seconds to do it, and the second one will take five seconds, but will use the same amount of power as the first chip would use in 9 seconds. Assuming the idle power on the faster chip doesn't eat up all the gains, you'll end up with better battery life by using the faster chip.

Unfortunately, I couldn't find full specs for the Nvidia Quadro K620M, so I can't say for sure whether that's the reason for that design decision.

Semi-segregated. At least in my experience, if there are passengers in coach coming in whose luggage won't fit in their overhead bins, the flight attendants will usually put the bags into empty bin space in first class, rather than going through the hassle of gate-checking it.

True, but once all the flights are flown by computer (we'll be there before you know it), the takeoffs and landings probably won't be nearly as high a percentage of crashes. A computer won't cut the wrong engine when one flames out, nor will it hesitate in throttling up the other one. It won't clip the edge of the barrier at the end of the runway. And so on.

That said, I'd kill to watch an aborted takeoff where sections of the plane get boosted a hundred feet straight up into the air, then deploy parachutes explosively. That would be pretty cool.

Mbps get 9 hours battery life.

No, MacBook Pros claim 9 hours of typical battery life. And when I'm just doing word processing, I get about that. Unfortunately, when I run real power-user apps, like Photoshop, Finale (music notation), Xcode, etc., I'm lucky if I get three hours.

Don't get me wrong, the effort that Apple has put into optimizing their apps and the OS itself is a very good thing, and it helps a lot for typical users. With that said, for what I do with my Mac, I'd trade this retina MBP for a thicker model in a heartbeat if Apple would stick the retina guts into a pre-retina MacBook Pro case and fill all the extra space with extra batteries (ideally with about four independent packs discharging approximately sequentially, but in random order, to maximize reliability in the event of a pack failure, but I digress).

And no, I don't care that it would be thicker or that it would weigh more. I carried around a Pismo with dual batteries for half a decade. It really doesn't matter that much.

Trademarks may stink, but they're the law. If you come up with an app you want to protect in a business segment, the ONLY way to protect your use of that app name in stores and (if you managed to acquire it) the domain name is to get yourself a REGISTERED trademark on it for that market segment. You can do it yourself for a few hundred dollars (US only). Without it, others can make a [poor] copy of your work, legally take your domain name away, have your app removed from stores, and cause all sorts of problems.

That's not true, at least in the United States (even for "famous trademarks"). If you are using a name in commerce and can document that you were using it prior to when the trademark was registered, your use of the trademark is considered to have priority, at least within the geographic region in which you were previously using it, and within the same category of products.

Most airlines load coach from back to front, though the ideal is probably back to front and outside to inside. And ideally, they would load people almost precisely in row order—basically use the whole Southwest numbered boarding thing, but with seat assignments. Otherwise, it is still pretty inefficient for the reasons you mention. I don't know why nobody does that.

As for why they load first-class first, that's easy. If they don't, there's a very good chance that first-class passengers would find themselves with insufficient overhead bin space for their stuff. If you paid three prices for a ticket and then they forced you to check your bag, you'd be seriously angry.

The reason some aircraft have a separate entrance for first-class is efficiency. When you have that many people boarding at once, you can't realistically load them all through one entrance. An ideal arrangement would put that second door in the middle of coach, so that half of them go forwards and the other half go backwards, rather than at the front of coach, but even just separating first/business from coach reduces the number of people using the coach door significantly. I realize that a center-boarding arrangement would be much harder to achieve (with the wing being in the way and all), but it would be nice if they could find a way.

I've been asking for compartmentalized planes for years, for two. Speed of boarding is one, but not the big one. Safety is the other. Imagine never having a single death from plane crashes except the ones that caused by sudden failures or pilot errors during takeoff and landing.

With a compartmentalized plane, if the airframe fails, the pilot could point it in the general direction of an uninhabited area, cut the engines, push the ejection button, calmly exit the cockpit into the front passenger compartment, strap into the jump seat, and wait. A few moments later, a series of explosive bolts would detonate, severing each compartment from the airframe a few seconds apart, and a parachute would deploy, thus bringing the compartment safely to the ground, with no lives lost.

You could even make deployment be automatic under certain circumstances, such as depressurization, descending below a present altitude without manually overriding it for landing, etc., thus saving lives in situations where the pilot becomes incapacitated. And you could put an emergency override on the outside of the cockpit to eliminate any possibility of mass-murder-suicide by airplane. (The suicide part might still happen, but at least an errant pilot couldn't take out everyone on the plane, too.)

In my experience, the first-class seat may or may not recline any farther than the coach seats do. You get more legroom, and more width, but you're often still basically sitting upright even with the seat fully reclined. Of course, it depends on the aircraft and how they've configured it.

For every plane used for overnight flights, they really need to take out about every second or third row, spread the seats proportionally, and make them recline. Crank up the ticket price proportionally. There's really no excuse for being unable to sleep on a redeye.

Even better, they could make it easier to change the configuration, like you can with a passenger van. The first time the plane is on the ground after 8:00 p.m., the ground crew could walk in, push a lever, slide the seat forward, lift it up, and carry it off the plane. The flight attendants could come along behind them and switch the lever that allows the remaining seats to recline further.

Alternatively, they could also make a section of the under-plane storage available to make the passenger compartment taller, then add Amtrak-style fold-down beds. At a particular time, you fold down the upper berths and the lower ones slide together in pairs, forming the bottom berths.

You mean in the aisles? Somehow, I don't think that will fly.... :-)

4chan is what happened. Who needs another shitty cesspool of Internet assholes?

Everyone does. The more cesspools where such behavior is tolerated, the less we'll have to deal with those people everywhere else.

Yes and no. Separation of sea and sky would be the final step if you interpret land forming to mean hardening. However, after the seas formed, there was a second period of dry land forming, in which it emerged from underneath the oceans. So depending on which dry land formation you're talking about, the order of those two could be correct.

The timing of the creation of day and night is, indeed, dubious, but... when did the moon actually collide with Earth and form what we know as the moon today, in terms of geological time?

Maybe those companies should try on-the-job training like every other industry....

The reality is that most science is determined by revelation as well. Although it is possible to prove various scientific constants, equations, etc., most people never do that. Most people learn what they were taught and then grow from there. Thus, scientific understanding is very much built upon the shoulders of giants just as religious beliefs are.

And when a scientist discovers something by experimentation and observation, is it any less truth if that scientist believes that God chose that moment to reveal that truth through his or her experiment?

IMO, the only conflict between those two philosophies lies in the minds and hearts of those who reject religion. The fact that scientists are only slightly less religious (statistically) than the general population is, IMO, strong empirical evidence that treatises on such conflicts are grounded more in atheists' need for self-jusitification than in actual facts.

All religions come with a package of beliefs concerning things such as how the world and humanity were created (things that are very much in the realm of science) ...

And curiously, the first of the two Genesis stories is a remarkably close approximation of the way an advanced, spacefaring race would explain the creation of the world to a primitive culture.

• Day 1: The big bang: God created light. The universe expanded and cooled into planets that orbited the sun: God separated the light from the darkness, creating night and day.
• Day 2: The earth cooled, and the seas receded as water froze near the ice caps in the first ice age, about 2.4 billion years ago, revealing significant amounts of dry land, and a viable atmosphere formed that protected earth from solar radiation: God made the firmament and separated the waters under the firmament (the oceans) from the waters (the early atmosphere contained a lot of water vapor, IIRC) above.
• Day 3: Plants formed—first single-celled organisms, then multicellular ones. (In reality, this began before the ice age part of day 2, but we're quibbling a little.)
• Day 4: The atmosphere evolved to be more conducive to live, with fewer clouds reflecting solar radiation, allowing more complex life to form. (God made the moon, sun, and stars.)
• Day 5: Fish formed, then the ancestors of modern birds (dinosaurs).
• Day 6: Land mammals and modern reptiles were formed, followed eventually by humans.

It isn't quite a detailed treatise on evolution, but I think that creation story is remarkably accurate for a science paper written 3,400 years ago, thousands of years before anyone knew what a dinosaur even was.

Parasitic worms in the gut don't usually change into microbes. :-)

But seriously, yeah, that bothered me when the original poster wrote it, as I'm assuming the original poster meant flora, but I decided to go with the term used in the post I was replying to, under the assumption that the poster really did mean tapeworms and similar....