Apparently, they don't pay their waitresses enough to buy clothes. Bless their hearts.

How can you possibly remember all that? Are you maintaining some of these old industrial DOS systems? I can tell you from the top of my head what record label a rock song from 1970 was on, but I couldn't make an autoexec.bat or config.sys if you put a gun to my head without googling it. And I must have done it a thousand times back in the day.

Of course there are people using 4gig VRAM that aren't gamers or bitcoin miners. But they're probably not buying a 970gtx.

Redneck Heaven

Oh my. That's a real place.

You don't drive your Ferrari around at max speed all the time,

I do in Need for Speed Rivals, which brings us full circle back to VRAM and nVidia trying to get those people who just bought Geforce 970s to start bugging their parents (or wives) for a GeForce 980 because goddamit, they promised 4gig VRAM and now I may not be able to play Arkham Knight on Ultra and that makes me feel awful.

Yeah, but what if you got that really good looking waitress from the Tilted Kilt to finally go out with you and you told her your car could to 200 and you drive out the Bonneville Salt Flats and it turns out your expensive car runs out of horses at 175mph and you're looking like the world's biggest douche?

How are you supposed to recover from that, huh? DAMN YOU nVIDIA!

They just need to run himem.sys with the right parameters.....

You just gave me a little shiver when I read that.

. Probably 99.9% of users don't have applications or hardware to use more than half of that VRAM anyways

Sure they do. People who are buying the 970 are either gamers or dopey bitcoin miners, and the top tier (and most of the middle-tier) of new games will use 4gig VRAM. Who knows about the bitcoin mining because that's all nonsense anyway. But I'll bet their little programs that they run using $1 of electricity to get 50 cents in bitcoins use every bit of that 4gig VRAM. Because they've got nothing but time to deal with bitcoin mining and GPU performance since they dropped out of grad school and now dad keeps insisting that they be looking for work but how can they do that when they're mining bitcoins goddamnit, which is the future of money and then they'll never need a job because they'll be the ones with all the money and dad's Roth IRA is going to be worthless, watch and see. And if they could just get they're hands on another $1500 (you know dad probably has it), they could really get this bitcoin rig humming and then they'd be spending $1 of electricity to mine 75 cents worth of bitcoins.

Gamers on the other hand (like me) paid for 4gig of VRAM to get more p's and more frames-per-secondses, and by god, we deserve to get 4 gig of VRAM.

OMG! You're saying the red light camera didn't dissuade you from driving through a red light??!!!!11 /snark

If I had bought my car new and was looking at features to add or avoid, I would have put the collision avoidance system on my "meh" list and would not have paid extra for it.

As it turns out, I really like it. I have the control setup for maximum distance, which means more false alerts. But although most alerts seem "false" they're only false because I'm really paying attention and have anticipated the traffic in front of me. About 25% of the time I think it's actually valuable and there was some risk of either a really quick stop or maybe even a fender bender.

The feature that goes along with it (they share the same radar system), distance sensing cruise control, I REALLY like. I wish it would beep or something when you get behind a vehicle driving 3+ MPH slower than your set point. On the Interstate its kind of easy to get in traffic going slower than I want to by small amounts and not noticing it because the car just matches pace with the vehicle in front.

I would think that traffic heuristics -- volume of packets, frequency of packets, persistence of TCP sessions, volume of data transferred, types of TCP connectivity would provide some hints of a VPN session versus other kinds of encrypted traffic -- would possibly provide a way to compare it to known types of encrypted traffic and see VPNs. It's not like the Chinese don't have terabytes or even petabytes of real-world wild sample traffic to compare against.

I wonder if there would be some way to beat it by combining steganography and encryption to make a VPN's traffic look like some kind of unencrypted web browsing session. Embed encrypted data into retrieved pages as GIFs and plaintext mixed in with nonsense plain text and pace the traffic patterns to more closely resemble the pace of actual page views, forcing new TCP sessions for each view.

About the only weakness would be consistently contacting the same server.

It might be less useful for the kinds of normal VPN uses (low data volume, long latency as traffic was fetched) but I would think you could beat the expectations of what VPN traffic is supposed to look like.

Your bigger problem isn't going to be lighting which could be rewired without tearing up the whole house but that any receptacles up there are probably on shared circuits with the rooms below, so when someone trips a breaker below the fucking AV setup goes dark too.

Your easiest solution is to just add a subpanel up there and power the room off the subpanel.

And that's the problem I think I mentioned earlier. If MVNOs rank carriers economically where more than one is available, you're sure to be connected to the shittiest one with the slower and less reliable network.

For one, Nicotine (when smoked) passes the blood-brain barrier within seconds.

The notion that a human antibody can intercept (and neutralize) a foreign substance that quickly is highly questionable. (If not silly).

However, the half-life of nicotine is 1-2 hours, and the metabolites have a half life of up to 20 hours. So let's assume for a minute that the vaccine does have an effect on systemic nicotine 'at some point' over the course of it's metabolization. Okay, fine. But the nicotine still went 'straight upstairs' after that first puff. Which means the only effect I can conceive of here is that the smoker will need another cigarette more quickly.

Is that a good thing?

Of course, IANAD so please correct me if I've got something wrong.